Call It in the Air

Praise for Call It in the Air

“Pavlić’s elegiac, genre-bending work considers the life and death of his elder sister, Kate, questions whether individuals can ever understand each other, and writes into and against the stronghold of personal loss and grief.”—Publishers Weekly, Top Ten for Fall 2022

“Pavli​​ć offers a vulnerable, visceral portrait of life and grief.”—Publishers Weekly

"We talk so much about permission, but seldom do we talk about soulful persuasion. More than any book I've read this decade, Call It in the Air pushed me to accept the absolute experience of grief, in all its abundance. Pavlić at first appears to do the heavy work of grief and assemblage for us, but he does more than that; he holds us slightly as he asks us to name what we see as we float, fall, and flee. Call It in the Air is simply one of the greatest elegies I have ever read."—Kiese Laymon

“Call It in the Air is an intimate record of grief and turmoil within family, sister, and self. Their voices cut across time and geography, from the early 1970s to the present, from ‘Near Buena Vista, CO’ to ‘Denver I.C.U.’ to ‘Salida, CO,’ and out along ‘I-80 E,’ forming a cartography of pain and failing body—eyes, liver, kidneys, feet, hands, and ‘nails black from the inside-out with blood.’ As he traverses between place and memory, his dying sister and himself, Ed Pavlić paints an intensely beautiful self-portrait: ‘I sit with a tissue, dizzy-ready.’ Ed Pavlić and Kate Pavlich: eternally bound by a love ‘misspelled.’” —Don Mee Choi

“At the center of Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air is a profoundly honest and deeply loving account of a brother’s bottomless grief. In language that is at once haunted and haunting, vivid and vulnerable, this book reconciles the darkest shadows of our memory with the light those we love leave behind.”—Lacy M. Johnson

Praise for Another Kind of Madness

“The pleasure of music and ache of language drive [Pavlić’s] first novel . . . Characters feed off one another like improvisatory musicians, and, like ‘Finnegan’s Wake,’ the book begins at the end and ends just before the beginning.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“An ode to Chicago, Kenya, and soul music as humanity’s worldwide hum . . . In Ed Pavlić’s remarkable and groundbreaking novel, Another Kind of Madness, literary tropes and images are pried loose.” —Colorado Review

“[A] beautiful debut novel . . . Pavlić’s prose is simple yet lyrical, which strikingly depicts not only the intricacies of Ndiya and Shame’s relationship, but also a city and its history, as seen through architectural turnover and musical evolution. This is a moving novel about two people finding the strength to move forward together.” —Publishers Weekly

“Pavlić delivers a soulful debut novel about love and restoring hope. . . . In prose by turns lyrical and mesmerizing, Pavlić taps deeply into what it means to be Black in America, tossing in some surprising narrative tricks along the way.” —Booklist

“This remarkable project, with its lyrical play and experimental structure, shrinks the moment between event and emotion—as well as the distance between text and experience—down to a dot.” —Africa is a Country

“Ed Pavlić’s Another Kind of Madness is a full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound. Pavlić guides his language and characters into holes, onto planes, and through doors I’ve never read or imagined. Pavlić’s narrative audacity and descriptive skill make every sentence and scene in Another Kind of Madness equal parts sorrow song, blues, funk, and of course jazz. I’ve not read a novel in recent history that so absolutely blurs, bruises, and complicates the space between mourning and morning. I am wonderfully devastated by the soul, scope, and execution of Another Kind of Madness and thoroughly inspired by this new kind of novel that is as at once wholly innovative and in deep conversation with so many Black American literary traditions.”—Kiese Laymon, author of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

“Reader beware. You imagine you hold a book in your hands, but it is a song, a rhythm of words and phrases that shudder the soul. You will wander with its wanderers, and every few minutes you will need to put the book down to hear again what you have just read. It is not enough that Chicago, Lamu Town—midwestern American, coastal Kenya—and other worlds shift and shimmer and suck you into the madness the book proposes, but you will depart the text with its lyrics ringing in your heart.”—Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust

“A fiercely vibrant meditation on how the interior life that eludes us returns through the sounds, secrets, and graces of others, through which Ed Pavlić rekindles, in his inimitable way, the meanings of ‘lyric’ and ‘soul.’”—Emily J. Lordi, author of Black Resonance

“Like a song that lingers in memory, Another Kind of Madness offers us a narrative that both moves and refuses to move, that leaps and at times seems to vanish. By this lyrical rhythm, Ed Pavlić defines diaspora as here but also everywhere and nowhere. In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.”—Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank

“Another Kind of Madness is a deliriously gorgeous novel. It is both hallucinatory and cogent, both African and Western, both stormy and gentle, and painted with a language that vibrates the bones. Ed Pavlić, whether we’re talking poetry or prose, is a master vernacularist, an adept cartographer of the human heart, and an artist with such subtle observational dexterity that one might imagine he’s directly in touch with the sublime.”—Reginald McKnight, author of He Sleeps