“… a deeply rich and surprising novel.” Amina Cain
“We go underground in this book, and keep digging, with hooves and claws, until we’ve surfaced into a timeless flood that absorbs all of the communites, animal and imagined, populating this entangled network of narratives that destroys yet refuses to stop regenerating.” Daniel Borzutzky
“… hallucinatory pleasures … await the reader in Steven Hendricks’ debut novel. The classics on future acid, coupled with deep emotion.” Brian Whitener
“…a powerful meditation on the real and the imaginary, consciousness and family, interspecies friendship, and the imbrications of animal and human experience in landscapes torn apart by violence.” Miranda Mellis
Chapter One available at The Brooklyn Rail
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Browser's Books, Olympia, WA
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Calamari Archive (Starcherone Edition)
"This book was so damn strange for me that I quit it around page 226 it was so bizarre ... the writing itself is pretty great. The author has spent a lot of time piecing things together in ways that don’t totally make sense, yet they do. ...if you’re capable and up for entering a totally bizarre, imaginative world, this is your book." (Sara's Organized Chaos: blog tour review)
What makes this book work isn’t the nebulous genre placement or even the fantastical nature of the events, but rather the quality of the writing. Hendricks is an exceptional writer, with an ability to weave a narration that could so, so easily be confusing and more than a bit contrived but instead becomes entirely evocative, sometimes heart-rending, and always believable. … you don’t see the writing: you just sit back and watch the story unfold. You get caught up in the characters and their feelings; you want to know more, even as it’s sometimes hard to face what they’re experiencing. You don’t always know what you’re going to find on the next page, but you also can’t stop yourself from turning it. (Dwell in Possibility: blog tour review)
a nuanced, multi-faceted tale that will delight and challenge any lover of literary fiction. Unpredictable and inventive Each plot line crafts a narrative of immense depth, one that allows Hendricks to dazzle, twist, and transfigure our understanding of all his worlds, all his stories. (Writing and Running Through Life: blog tour review)
What a smart, beautiful story! I absolutely LOVED Hendricks’ novel, Little Is Left To Tell – it was AMAZING!! Here’s what I loved: The writing was beyond excellent. It was emotional, powerful, and beautiful. I enjoyed immersing myself in it tremendously. The stories intertwine – bunnies and Mr. Fin. One minute you are reading about an elderly man with dementia grieving his son and then suddenly its all about the bunnies. How brilliant is that? Believe me, it is. The disjointed feel of the story is difficult at first, and distracting at times. However, you find yourself easily adjusting to these abrupt transitions in the story rather quickly. Plus, I thought it was a clever way to show us what someone experiencing memory loss has to deal with – the way their mind must work jumping from one thought to another, because they are losing memories left and right. It almost reads like a stream of consciousness, which I found to be rather illuminating. Using the characters to introduce literary icons like Woolf and Hemingway added such depth and whimsy to the story. Loss and grief were the big themes and the manner in which Hendricks threaded them throughout his story was creative to a tee. Never knowing what time period or whose viewpoint we are reading about begged the question, “Is this real?” I loved trying to figure out what was truly happening with Mr. Fin – it made for such an emotional reading experience. This is definitely a hard book to summarize. Just know that its wonderfully written, mesmerizing, and provides plenty of food for thought. I would happily recommend Little Is Left To Tell to anyone looking for a unique reading experience – you will not be disappointed! (A Bookish Way of Life: blog tour review)
My first novel, Little is Left to Tell, was in the works for a long time. Two key sentences, “Mr Fin wakes with an eye like a sharp rock,” and “Mr Fin has always loved park benches,” were repeated throughout an early draft begun in college. Those sentences got me started on almost every new section of a very fragmented and poetic vision; I found the profound dullness of the sentences an easy way to open each new foray into Mr Fin’s melancholy days.
The novel changed forms several times and became my graduate thesis at SAIC. At that time it was more of a book… that is, it wasn’t in book form as a matter of convenience, but I was using the recto and verso pages in a spatial dialogue with one another. This was exciting, and I kept developing it after graduate school, while finding a job in Olympia and while my wife and I had our babies.
The visual / physical form felt vital, but in another sense, I was avoiding something. The story had always revolved around the connection between a Mr Fin and a David, and David usually died before some crucial story could exist between them. In the “book” version, this dynamic was explicitly the artifice of a third character, the verso page, the voice of a writer who observes the fictional process unfolding for the characters. You can imagine the right hand side of the page being the theater and the left hand side the playwright with limited control over what goes on, perhaps realizing, at last, why he wrote it in the first place, scribbling notes.
But I was avoiding the thickness of the relationship between the Fin and David characters, and I was avoiding certain challenges: in that version, something called the “Story” had physical form: it tormented and evaded Mr Fin. I had to try writing my way into that unknown story.
That’s where the rabbits came in.
I started the rabbit story separately, motivated by the need to write something else and by the discovery of a strange French language primer, Francais pour les jeunes — les lapins et les souris.
That’s a picture of the littler critters’ (in this case, mice) house being destroyed in a zeppelin raid. I have always struggled to learn french, so my piecemeal understanding of the text led me to some interesting openings for a strangely dark anthropomorphic animal tale. One thing I took to right away was the apparent discomfort of the mice in their slightly humanized form. The one here, in the yellow shirt, looks terribly uncomfortable, neither standing like a mouse or like a human, and the other one seems a bit smashed. Granted, they’re cowering in the debris of their home.
The rabbit story quickly grew, and all at once I was able to see the story of Mr Fin and David intertwining with it, and that the strange opening of the original… the bombing, was exactly the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen in a bedtime story.
At the same time, I had scrapped the, let’s say, fourth full draft of the novel of Mr Fin and David. I decided to give up on writing a novel for a while and that I needed to make something short out of it at least, something that might get into a journal somewhere. So I chose the moment when Mr Fin sees something like a body float ashore, thinks it’s David, and takes it home—a more compressed, immediate tale. However, the new start, combined with the dawning connection to the bunny story, led me well away from a short story and on into the final version of the work, which took another five years to complete.