JL Civi writes genre-blurring stories with equal parts wry humor and heartbreaking urgency. Music and time travel turn up frequently in his work along with rule-bending wordplay and fourth-wall breaking narrators. He’s an acquired taste with a unique voice described as quietly eerie, funny, tender, slightly ridiculous, relatably self-aware, and weirdly wise. Too odd for the mainstream yet too normal for bizarro, nobody does absurdist literary surrealism with a poignant pop-culture pulse quite like JLC.
