Those Brave As the Skate Is

Those Brave As the Skate Is is two books in one binding: an innovative novel followed by a separately demarcated manifesto on Pescetarealism, the aesthetic program Patrick Keller coined in 2010. The novel does not gesture toward the manifesto; the manifesto answers for the novel, on the page, immediately after.

Keller frames Pescetarealism as an extension of Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick's egalitarian surfiction, tilted away from performance, the showy virtuoso side, toward persistence, the long ordinary practice of writing. That argument is not incidental to the fiction; it is bolted to its back.

The 2018 Kenneth Patchen Award judge, the novelist Jønathan Lyons, called it "a visionary work, one that challenges form and content, destroying both to recreate them in its own vision. Patrick Keller's breadth of vision is simply astonishing." The prize recognized the way the novel and the manifesto hold together as one argument about form-making.