“[Novel Explosives] is a fascinating book, it’s a difficult book, and it’s a pleasure to be able to introduce it to you. I think that this is what my program Bookworm is for: to find books like this that are of enormous ambition and largely unknown to readers, and say, ‘Hey, get out there! Order the book! Try this out! You haven’t seen anything like this before!'”
—Michael Silverblatt, BOOKWORM, 89.9 FM, KCRW, July 20, 2017
“Of all the books that we’ve promoted on this show, I think yours is the best, and deserves most the attention that it hasn’t gotten…. I had a similar feeling of elation finishing this book as I did when I wrapped Infinite Jest and The Instructions by Adam Levin. The puzzle is so fun to solve. At the sentence level, this book is a blast to read.”
“We contrasted your humor with Thomas Pynchon’s, who’s a little more slapstick. Yours is more dry. There’s more of an edge to it. But there’s also an absurdity to it, which I find very winning…. One of the passages that really lit up with me [was when] you contrast a guy who’s rotting away in Mussolini’s prison with the act of eating a delicious gordita, which I thought was absolutely hilarious.”
—Jeremy Kitchen, Michael Sack, and Jamie Trecker, EYE 94, Lumpen Radio, WLPN-LP, 105.5 FM, Chicago, April 15, 2018
“Gauer’s novel is a burst of fresh air, and it resembles a Tarantino movie in the energetic drive of the prose, the jumbling of time, unexpected humorous lines or scenes, quasi-rhapsodic passages about the quotidian, direct addresses to the reader along with other meta-fictional flourishes.”
IT’S THE WEEK AFTER EASTER, APRIL 13-20, AN OTHERWISE ORDINARY WEEK IN 2009… LATE in the week, a man wakes up in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact, but with no sense of who he is, or how he came to Guanajuato. EARLY in the week, a venture capital investor sits at his desk in Santa Monica, California, attempting to complete his business memoirs, but troubled by the fact that a recent deal appears to be some sort of money-laundering scheme. IN THE MIDDLE of the week, two gunmen for the Juárez Drug Cartel arrive at a small motel in El Paso, assigned to retrieve a suitcase full of currency, and eliminate the man who brought it to El Paso. THUS BEGINS the three-stranded narrative of Novel Explosives, a search for identity that travels through the worlds of venture capital finance, high-tech money-laundering methods, and the Juárez drug wars, a joyride of a novel with only one catch: the deeper into the book you go, the more dangerous it gets. JIM GAUER is a mathematician, published poet, and possibly the world’s only Marxist Venture Capitalist.