Synopses & Reviews
Set in modern-day San Francisco, this obsessive fiction probes the stormy life of Alice, a passionate and whip-smart young woman who works at a law firm. Alice faces despair and occasional rapture as she struggles with simultaneously real and hallucinated relationships, including a tumultuous romance with her co-worker David, and an escalating war with her supervisor Fran. In lyrical prose,
Bridge exposes a raw, brilliant, and furious mind as it treads the jagged terrain of mental illness, murder, and suicide—to be or not to be.
Robert Thomas is the author of Door to Door (2002, Fordham University Press), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize, as well as Dragging the Lake (2006, Carnegie Mellon University Press). He has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife in Oakland, California, and works as a legal secretary in San Francisco.
Review
"A novel in stories that brings readers deep into the eccentric and neurotic mind of its protagonist. Thomas links these 56 stories with a consistent voice. Alicea lonely, at times suicidal womannarrates the minutiae of her life with insight and wit ... Thomas prose in these episodic vignettes is tight and vivid. In each two-to-three page installment, solipsistic Alice is given black humor and memorable one-liners ... With emotional resonance, an innovative structure and a unique narrator, Thomas crafts a book that's greater than the sum of its parts."
Kirkus Review"Crisp, concise, emotionally explosive riffs, Thomass 56 brief, linked stories are linguistic tours de force that together form an unsettling character study ... Alice leads her lonely life in what she calls the Goldilocks Zone”: not too crazy, not too sanea just-right (if tenuous) balance between calm and losing it ... Thomas has a gift for using a minimum of words with maximum effect." Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Review
Bridge ... may borrow a weapon, along with a taut style and a slender economy, from James M. Cain, but this is no crime story. Instead, and perhaps incongruously, it is a quiet, interior novel, a character study in which the prose plays a bigger role than the plot. What happens in the story is minimal: San Francisco legal secretary Alice falls in love with her married colleague David, antagonizes her supervisor, Fran, and buys that gun. But how it happensand how Alice describes it happeningis striking, unsettling and profound ... Alice reminds us of the truth about how hard it can be for anyone whos really paying attention to survive in a world composed of such extremes of beauty and indifference."
San Francisco Chronicle"Crisp, concise, emotionally explosive riffs, Thomass 56 brief, linked stories are linguistic tours de force that together form an unsettling character study ... Alice leads her lonely life in what she calls the Goldilocks Zone”: not too crazy, not too sanea just-right (if tenuous) balance between calm and losing it ... Thomas has a gift for using a minimum of words with maximum effect." Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"A novel in stories that brings readers deep into the eccentric and neurotic mind of its protagonist. Thomas links these 56 stories with a consistent voice. Alicea lonely, at times suicidal womannarrates the minutiae of her life with insight and wit ... Thomas prose in these episodic vignettes is tight and vivid. In each two-to-three page installment, solipsistic Alice is given black humor and memorable one-liners ... With emotional resonance, an innovative structure and a unique narrator, Thomas crafts a book that's greater than the sum of its parts." Kirkus Review
Made up of fifty-six two-to-five page exercises in associative thinkingvibrant thought connecting vibrant thoughtRobert Thomas's first novel Bridge will delight the more experimentally inclined, analytical reader. Bridge is an engaging, meandering exploration of the mind of the novel's protagonist, Alice, as she struggles with thoughts of suicide; her affection for her married co-worker, David; and her antagonistic relationship with her supervisor, Fran.” Bookslut
Ever wonder what that quiet girl in the office is thinking? The serial monologues of Alice, self-described as an irrational prime number, place us inside a wholly original, slightly suicidal, radically unconventional mind: precariously balanced, yet how far down she can see without falling. In this poets tour de force fiction, Thomas imaginative language created in me, to transplant his phrase, what medical books accurately term prolonged dazzle.” Eleanor Wilner, Ploughshares
"If youre not stunned by the language of this poets novel, you will be by the plot, a monologue of suspense and grief; or by the narrator, the painfully smart and self-aware Alice." —Laurie Greer, Politics and Prose
Synopsis
Bridge exposes a brilliant, furious mind treading the jagged terrain of mental illness, murder, and suicide in modern-day San Francisco.
Synopsis
WINNER OF THE 2015 PEN CENTER USA LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
Set in modern-day San Francisco, this obsessive fiction probes the stormy life of Alice, a passionate and whip-smart young woman who works at a law firm. Alice faces despair and occasional rapture as she struggles with simultaneously real and hallucinated relationships, including a tumultuous romance with her co-worker David, and an escalating war with her supervisor Fran. In lyrical prose, Bridge exposes a raw, brilliant, and furious mind as it treads the jagged terrain of mental illness, murder, and suicideto be or not to be.
Robert Thomas is the author of Door to Door (2002, Fordham University Press), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize, as well as Dragging the Lake (2006, Carnegie Mellon University Press). He has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife in Oakland, California, and works as a legal secretary in San Francisco.
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Synopsis
Bridge is a collection of linked-stories about a troubled young woman?Alice?who works at a San Francisco law firm. Alice goes through despair and occasional rapture as she struggles with simultaneously real and hallucinated relationships with her co-worker David (of the romantic variety) and her supervisor Fran. Passionate, whip-smart, furious, and perceptive, Alice contemplates both suicide and murder as she struggles to find meaning in the day-to-day interactions of her life.
Robert Thomas holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He lives in Oakland, California, and works as a legal secretary in San Francisco.
About the Author
Robert Thomas is the author of Door to Door (2002, Fordham University Press), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize, and Dragging the Lake (2006, Carnegie Mellon University Press). He has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife in Oakland, California, and works as a legal secretary in San Francisco.