Praise
for Patrick Earl Ryan’s If We Were Electric
Roxane Gay
author of Difficult Women and Hunger
If We Were Electric, the debut short story collection from New Orleans’s native Patrick Earl Ryan is, indeed, fiercely electric. These twelve startling fictions have been crafted by a writer with an assured and absolutely original voice and a remarkable understanding of how place is as much a compelling character in a good story as the people who populate it. There are stories here about unrequited love and youthful yearning, the complexities of desire between men, the beginnings and ends of relationships, deaths both inevitable and untimely, the bitter ache of loneliness, the quiet horrors that unexpectedly befall us, and the magic of the ordinary world. With this outstanding collection, Patrick Earl Ryan makes his mark on Southern literature and how!
Martin Pousson
author of No Place, Louisiana and Black Sheep Boy
Ryan seduces us... into an awareness and awakening to the fact that if you're truly alive, if you're truly beating, and smelling, and sensing, then you are always fucking up, you are always behaving badly, but each bad step is a step that moves you forward. In If We Were Electric we're always moving forward ultimately to grace. There's always feux follet, there's always light at the end. The plots are sinewy, they're forked like all the little waterways around New Orleans, but there's often this burst like a coronary system. There are passages even that have the fierce familiar grip of a tender heart. The ultimate triumph of If We Were Electric is that through all of the murk and mud and the mystery of New Orleans, at the end, what Ryan really delivers is an incredibly light, powerful, and majestic sense of what it means to be human in a place as topsy-turvy as New Orleans.
Felice Picano
Felice Picano’s review on GoodReads
“Where It Takes Us” felt especially close to me since as a young teen I was used as ballast by my elder brother in two drag races. Never as movingly as here; Ryan captures the hot helplessness of being unable to help someone with a fatal illness and how we lie to them for both our sakes.
Mark Massaro
I am always pleased when a writer captures the tone and particularities of a city, making it feel as alive as the characters that actually inhabit it. Danticat does this with Haiti, O’Connor with the American South, and London with the Alaskan Klondike. These writers present their cultures as healing influences in the character’s journeys: Haiti, according to Danticat, provides it from artistic expression, O’Connor’s South, through human grace, and finally London’s wilderness, through communion with the natural landscape. The characters in Ryan’s New Orleans rectify through self-awareness and hope... It’s obvious when writers create stories to simply entertain or when they create them because the stories need to be in the world. Ryan does both with this collection, because as captivating as they are, these stories represent voices of the disenfranchised, namely those muted from the default mainstream status enjoyed by economically prosperous and heteronormative people. Ryan’s characters have a wisdom and undiluted perspective that the dominant culture ignores, which is why their experience is important.
Jim Piechota
Infused with all the mystique and mystery that New Orleans is known for comes this enchanting, hypnotic debut story collection from Patrick Earl Ryan … that, at its best, probes deeply into the interior souls of its characters and embodies New Orleans as a living, breathing entity.… Ryan is a true natural at weaving textured language and complex characterization into plots that are serpentine and saturated with emotional complexity. This quality is exceptional for a debut author and a definite determinant for a gilded literary career ahead. Addictively gorgeous and mesmerizing, Ryan's collection of twelve literary gems are meant to be savored, re-read, and reflected upon as readers await his next creation.
Jim Gladstone
[Ryan] combines the insight of a seasoned writer with the crackling energy of a literary wunderkind. Every one of these Louisiana-set tales is densely populated and richly detailed. They almost burst at the seams, as if each story had the potential to grow into a novel. The result is work that practically rustles off the page, with even minor characters offering major memorability.… These dangerous, heartwrenching stories will grab you like kudzu and suck you in like a swamp.
Amos Lassen
When I closed the covers of “If We Were Electric,” I remained haunted not only by the stories but also by how they were told. Be prepared to clear your day when you sit down to read. I found it impossible to stop and continued on though the night…
Lucian Childs
Like runes cast for purposes of divination, the wordcraft is concise, poetic, capitalizing on a strong southern voice. Many of the stories are also like poems, tending to the short. And they are deeply queer—queer to the bone—which is where this collection is most at home.
Shari Simpson
Ryan’s characters grasp and strive for something always out of reach, be it a dream or the perfect sexual encounter or even just a great high and munchies satisfied by “a big bowl of canned peaches with condensed milk and Bailey’s Irish Cream.” These are real people painted in vivid colors, fighting for life against the backdrop of New Orleans in all its garish oddness, and the rhythms and cadence of each story reflect the individual battles.