You-Gin One-Gin, by Douglas Robinson

Sort of a Novel

Who is shooting people in Liberal, Kansas, and why are the bullets mainly mystical rounds? What really happens the second time an American writer is abducted by aliens? How would Vladimir Nabokov have rewritten the book his ghost helps narrate?

You-Gin One-Gin answers these questions across three wildly inventive layers: a stage adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the narration of Kip Knurl, African-American theater professor at Liberal State University, and the surreal perspective of Nabokov’s ghost. Each section ends with a “shooting”—in the play, on campus, and in ghostly metafiction—though no one truly dies.

A genre-defying ride for lovers of absurdist humor, experimental narrative, and the exhilarating intersections of literature, science, and the supernatural.

“In this hilarious tripartite Robinsonian cruise of metaleptic abracadabra, the authorial attributee of You-Gin One-Gin is at his novelistic best, chasing and transforming Pushkin, Nabokov, Philip K. Dick, Vonnegut, John Barth, and Shakespeare in the manner so obscurely familiar from his Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia and Insecticide.” —Ivan Delazari, Nazarbayev University