"Driven by deep experimentation with the conventions of fiction--chapter, plot, the requirements against obliteration--but with a shameless commitment to narrative, Roth makes a novel seemingly from thin air. In a poetic voice inflected by visual and aural space, Line and Pause reveals both the body and the spirit of the artistic life."

—Kazim Ali

There is a Japanese short verse that goes, "with a spring breeze we see ripples go down, and thin pieces of ice seem still there." This remarkable novel reminds me of this, the quality of water, or the liquidity of ink. It is a poetic fiction whose unique tone moves gracefully as a brush stroke of calligraphy. A wonderful work on the whole, I urge you to read this book Forrest Roth is one of the hidden greats!

—Geoffrey Gatza

Brushstrokes, clouds, tea, sex – Forrest Roth’s Line and Pause exhibits and brilliantly manipulates the signs of things Japanese. But Roth’s quarry is deeper than mere surface: the mysterious in existence itself, those things which escape our easy apprehension. How do we know the future? How the present? What leads us to love, or betrayal, or art? In his portrait of a puzzled, searching woman in the contemporary moment of a traditional society, Roth’s prose is like brushpainting itself, which must be both careful and swift, studied and spontaneous, creating its austere, beautiful effects. A terrific first novella, heralding a writer we'd best keep our eyes on.

—Ted Pelton

 

FORREST ROTH lives in Buffalo, New York, and curates the COMMUNIQUE Reading Series for the Just Buffalo Literary Center. His fictions appear or are forthcoming in Noon, Quick Fiction, Paragraph, Snow Monkey, Elimae, and other publications.