Don Bronco’s (Working Title) Shell
Donald Ryan
October 2022
“Half what-the-hell-did-I-just read, half hell-yeah-I-just-read-that, Don Bronco’s (Working Title) Shell is an eggshell-delicate narrative where you peel back the layers to reveal another egg—and when you peel back that layer there’s another damn egg. It’s hard not to think of Pynchon (that’s a good thing), but this ain’t pastiche. Clearly a labor of love, the book is funny, charming, deeply pontificating, and whipcrack smart. We could all learn a thing or two from it.”
Zeek found the first piece of eggshell in his High Country omelette. Don Bronco's more concerned about this than he is.
Don Bronco's (Working Title) Shell explores the roots of creativity and inspiration. A triptych of sorts. As if Italo Calvino had written Stranger Than Fiction. Familiar and unique, funny and maddening. You'll come away questioning your day to day, seeing your own story in a whole new light.
Paperback
400 pages
Cover design by David Wojciechowski
ISBN 9781088068441
Available from the publisher, as well as Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, and most other book retailers.
Praise for Don Bronco’s (Working Title) Shell
Don Bronco's (Working Title) Shell is equal parts mindfuck Groundhog Day, a soliloquy-packed meta adventure story, and a multidimensional study of the writing process. It's also a book about eggshells. Ryan creates a lush linguistic landscape as a backdrop for this meditative collage exploring inspiration, influence, and meaning. I loved spending time in this strange world, which may indeed be the real world, full of stalkers, doubles, reimaginings, and reboots as I collected clues and questioned the meaning of truth in storytelling. Who is Don Bronco? Who is Donald Ryan? As one of them (or both) puts it: this is “creativity...[as] its own implicit narrative."
—Emily Costa, author of Until It Feels Right
Sits at the intersection of surrealism and critical introspection, deconstructing the self-delusion required to produce independent literature in a way not typically seen in independent literature. With more witticisms and wordplay than the New York Times Games section, Don Bronco is the novelist acknowledging his role as desperate voyeur, The Truman Show by way of Charlie Kaufman. It is a dose of perspective, a bitter taste of reality for the aspiring artist.
—Dan Eastman, author of Watertown
Don Bronco's (Working Title) Shell is a pinwheeling novel of branching paths and meta-narratives, anchored always by Ryan's warm and funny prose style. This book brings together Pynchonesque oddball characters and Donald Barthelme's fourth wall-breaking deconstruction, but with a comic voice reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces. A charming and playful debut that will have you flipping back through its pages as soon as you finish, piecing together all the scenes and characters to grasp the big picture. Although it is a clever book, it is never cold, always brimming with plenty of heart, humanity and goodwill.
—Wallace Barker, author of La Serenissima
