Testimonials
” If Saul Bellow had written science fiction, it might read like Michael Strelow’s Some Assembly Required: erudite and allusive, delighting in language, but also wildly funny and entertaining. A page-turning meditation on the multiplicity of voices each of us carries—those we use to reach out to others, those that exist only in our heads—this novel illuminates the beautiful and mysterious transformation that occurs when we listen carefully, turning all the noise that surrounds us into harmony.
- Scott Nadelson, author of The Fourth Corner of the World
” Michael Strelow has given Northwest readers an amazing fable for our time and place featuring Ben Brown, a utility lineman who transforms into the Green Man following an industrial accident. Eco-hero and prophet, the Green Man heads a cast of wonderful and zany characters who fixate over sundry items from filberts to hubcaps…Fascinating, humorous and wise, The Greening of Ben Brown deserves its place on bookshelves along with other Northwest classics.
- Craig Lesley, author of Storm Rider
” I had discovered the one secret thing that I could know and the rest of the family could not’ is the dream of any child at sea in a big family, and the narrator who begins this book has his talisman to hold and study and live by. What he has, and what we have, is a book before it was a book, and that makes life a thrill and a mystery. If a box of manuscript pages were a whale, and the rainy fastness of the Oregon coast were the sea, then the reader of this book would be in the grips of the Ahab writer of this book, bound for a quest. The pages of The Moby-Dick Blues are like a veil through which the reader may pass between the incantations of Melville and the songs of Strelow. Read and be carried away.
- Kim Stafford, author of 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared