The River Gods

"In The River Gods, Brian Kiteley masterfully employs his patent narrative method of uncanny subtraction, removing the ligatures of conventional fiction the better to provide a field of implication in which the historical mysteries of America can resonate to maximum effect. In response to the post modern insight that everything is happening at the same time, he brings demonstrable proof of the fact in this luminous, perfectly sculpted novel whose sentences flow as easily through the mind of a nine year old boy in 1960’s America as they do that of an 18th century Puritan divine. The River Gods is one of the most searching portraits of our country I’ve ever read."-- Eli Gottlieb

"Brian Kitely, a writer of great delicacy, perspicacity, and guile, has in The River Gods presented us with a cornucopia of bittersweet vignettes: glimpses of the lives and deaths, the loves and larks and sorrows of a New England town, told outside chronology and inside the vision of several centuries interlaced. The book may have its precedents, but it is in essence strikingly original, and it deserves to become a classic, for all its sophistication a very American one: it tells us who we have been, in a way we never could have guessed."--Harry Mathews