“The Man in the Banana Trees kicks ass. Every story is a surprise. The dexterity of Marguerite Sheffer’s prose is absolutely awe-inspiring. By turns heartbreaking and brilliant, Sheffer’s stories remind one of George Saunders and Amy Hempel in their playfulness and through their special eye for tragedy.”—Jamil Jan Kochai, judge, Iowa Short Fiction Award
 

“The Man in the Banana Trees is a truly remarkable work of literary art and marks the arrival of an absolutely brilliant new storyteller. Marguerite Sheffer is an endlessly inventive writer, but she’s also a philosopher capable of drawing metaphor and meaning from the lives of ordinary people trapped in extraordinary circumstances. Following the path of acclaimed writers like Borges, Márquez, Link, Machado, and Keegan, Sheffer promises to provide remarkable stories for many years to come.”—Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author, The American Daughters
 

“A collection that writes its own miraculous language for the meaning of art and the question of our moral obligation to others. The range here dazzles—a contemporary ballet stage, a nineteenth-century artists’ colony, a ship full of ghosts, a life stalked by grief in the form of a virtual-reality tiger—and all these pictures are knit into a single breathtaking view by a sensibility that’s both empathetic and unyieldingly keen. The Man in the Banana Trees is a blaze of light, brilliant enough to illuminate not only its characters’ interior lives but also the reader’s own.”—Clare Beams, author, The Garden