Mermaids for Attila

“Jacques Servin is a comic writer whose awesome intelligence sails along and occasionally ploughs the border between language and a half-dreamed, half-lived life. The titles, seemingly plucked raw from the middle of still screaming paragraphs, can by themselves cause a kind of vertigo: “The Method of Distillery Was Remarkable but We Angled Down,” “Bad Day on the Moon,” and “Spooky Days of the Wide-Eyed.” The paragraphs themselves heal magically fast because Servin is a frighteningly inventive writer. At times the undertow of other languages and a mysterious occult quality make the text quake. . . . I felt occasionally that I was riding a tilt-a-smorgasbord during an earthquake. Mermaids for Attila is a stupendously original collection, and Attila the Reader can but accept these mermaids (Servin stories) with awed (if occasionally queasy) gratitude.”
—Andrei Codrescu, author of Belligerence