The Book of Daniel

The characters who populate Daniel Grandbois’s collection Unlucky Lucky Days, which he’ll share tonight, are a wee bit eccentric. Take Carl, a man who removes his teeth with a pair of pliers, runs them through his washer and dryer and then reinserts them into his mouth, all because he ran out of toothpaste. As this tale suggests, Grandbois prefers to create his own world rather than trying to capture the one where the rest of us reside. “I always beat my head against a rock trying to do that realist thing,” he concedes.

Local music fans know Grandbois as a bassist for Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Tarantella and Munly and the Lupercalians — and he concedes that he didn’t really get into either reading fiction or writing it until college. Among his first literary creations was The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, which he penned and then filed away for fifteen years before unearthing and revamping it; the results are scheduled for publication on the Green Integer imprint this fall. Unlike Hermaphrodite, in which a story is told through brief vignettes, Unlucky’s (often very) short stories stand alone in a wonderfully unusual way. “In the end, you have to learn what’s you and what’s not,” Grandbois says, “and I’ve never been that interested in watching characters develop. I’m much more interested in the kind of stuff I write.”

Grandbois steps forward at 7:30 p.m. at the LoDo Tattered Cover, 1628 16th Street. Learn more at 303-436-1070 or www.tatteredcover.com.
Tue., July 8, 2008