Calvin Marks is out of fathers. Half-closeted and horny, the stories his dad tells about former girlfriends and the redeeming pulse of history (as a middle-aged high school teacher, his dad's spent enough time considering both) just won't cut it. Calvin tries to make sense out of summer hookups and a bristling community memory of 9/11, but words fail and what's familiar is becoming unrecognizable.
Crashing in Williamsburg with his cousin Alexa, Calvin crosses paths with Gus. As Calvin becomes entangled in Gus's world of jaded cover-band musicians, he wonders if adulthood doesn't have to be synonymous with loss.
Fifteen years later, Calvin returns from abroad to find the absences of his ex-partners still haunting him. Seeing his own journey in relief, he finds that coming of age, and into community, does not end ? and the urge to isolate oneself in search of easier communion has to be fought at all costs.
"I Dreamed I Saw Augustine opens the gaps between the felt and the spoken, making you hold your breath because you're inside the sentences as they bend and twist into the merging of bodies in motion, a craving for time, dreaming with an uneven pulse, trust in strangers, fear of the known, a kind of introspection that takes in the whole world. Here Ryan Schulte writes so beautifully about desire and loss, legacy and absence, living in the ruins of family, nation, culture, and all the other broken promises." ?Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl
"I Dreamed I Saw Augustine is a travelogue, a quest for home, and a disquisition on yearning. Time-tripping in the best possible way, the novel tells of Calvin Marks' search for stability and clarity in the chaos of love and loss. Ryan Schulte writes with the fervor of a true believer?in love, in heartache, in purpose?while leaving the mysteries intact. I had the held-breath joy of discovery reading it, like the first time I encountered Bruno Schulz and Eileen Myles. A voice that startles with its honesty and strangeness and devotion." ?Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book
"With deft, cool prose and perceptivity, in I Dreamed I Saw Augustine Schulte has created a wonder of form and feeling ? a dreamy debut from a remarkably talented writer. It feels classic." ?Peter Scalpello, author of Mirrorstage
"In this remarkable debut, Ryan Schulte folds time and memory again and again, examining the creases for moments of connection that are both nodes of possibility and safeguards against despair. Narrator Calvin's inner life unfurls in prose that thrums?and occasionally explodes?as we follow him from the jagged edge of youth to the hard-won wisdom of experience." ?Rebecca van Laer, author of Cat and How to Adjust to the Dark.
Ryan Schulte is a community gardener with NYC Parks. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Oyez Review 51, Blood Orange, and elsewhere. Ryan is a graduate of Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College. He lives in Washington Heights, New York. This is his first novel.
