Lee Fontanella

American Foreign Policy

Fiction

“So, you like your humor dark? Here you have it, served up on a tarnished platter, with characters so low that we question the foundation of America. While ‘endlessly self-abased’ Creighton is the basis for riotously funny stuff, it doesn’t seem so funny when we contemplate the focus of the lectures paralleling his own story: the finessing of American foreign policy. Why even think of spreading influence when we ourselves are such a deplorable, crumbling, irremediable mess?”

Food for Jackals

Fiction

“In intricately wrought novellas, John Zeugner gives us characters who we're glad we're not, but whom we love to watch be put through their paces. Like Frank, the tennis player, they achieve their petty victories. Like Seaman Spradlin, they are inadequate when faced with moral dilemmas. Like Claudio/Hugh, they are vain puffs, more interested in self-gratification than in the higher causes they pretend to espouse. No alignment with club or country, on any level, can fully redeem them.”

Longboat Key

Fiction

“Just when you thought that Florida in the late fifties was all late-Deco, well-meaning snowbirds, and honest speculation in blameless retirement homes, Zeugner puts on display a dirty-laundry list of the blemishes that made post-war Florida a far cry from pastel structures and water-ski gardens, Esther Williams style. This is a world—an unwitting hell?—where shady real-estate Ponzi schemes run parallel to the fakery of life itself, of just being. It is a last outpost, humanity’s sorry land’s end, metaphorized in the haunting wartime memory of the delusional beached soldier in the Philippines, who struggled uselessly to stuff his gut back into his own body, in order to become whole again.”

The Game in the Past

Fiction

“I have read most of John Zeugner's always-engaging, creative prose, and The Game in the Past is the best of the lot. Here, we get classic Zeugner: continent-hopping, culture-jumping, language-switching . . . . [T]his is highly suggestive stuff, presented as an imagined history, which, if it had happened in the way that Game entices us to believe it did, is a terrifying message about human nature . . . . Game leads us to see that history won't bring the horror to light, but novel might.”