“One reads [The Thirteenth Month] relishing its refined narrative pleasures as much as its intricate patterns and resonant allusions.”

—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen

Select Praise

“A lot of you will dig this novel from Unbound Edition Press: 'The Discarded,' by Colin Hamilton, is a Borgesian collection of imaginary book synopses (the titles purported to have been culled after a library renovation). Uncanny connections abound in the diverse mix.” — Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“I figured I'd dip into a couple fictions [from The Discarded] to get the flavor of the whole, but quickly found myself riveted by the bright, complex, self-aware, idiosyncratic, book-adoring imagination at work in its pages … it's a Borgesian love story to the very idea of books and reading; a paean to those texts (& therefore people) who somehow slipped between the cracks; &, at its deepest stratum, a contemplation about the various forms of mortality waiting for us all.” — Lance Olson

“Colin Hamilton’s The Discarded is a cunningly built novel, its simplicity on the surface masking the intricate layers beneath … Hamilton plays with narrative expectations, offering a novel that lingers less for its plot than for the gnawing sense that nothing—not the story, the author, or even the book itself—can be taken at face value. It is highly rewarding.” — Time’s Flow Stemmed

“… there’s something mesmerizing about the collective encyclopedia of knowledge [these discarded books] comprise … a moving celebration of even those works that arguably warrant being consigned to oblivion.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The Thirteenth Month is a multiverse of mirrors and infinite texts spanning the inevitable labyrinth that exists between a young man’s books and his reality. It belongs in the company of Borges, Pessoa and Schulz, the very writers Hamilton admires, all the while cleverly disguised as an Iowan’s bildungsroman. One reads this novel relishing its refined narrative pleasures as much as its intricate patterns and resonant allusions.”
—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen

“The Thirteenth Month is a sui generis novel; with echoes of memoir, travelogue, bibliography, and kunstlerroman, it contains the research and lore of a great essay, the depth of a metaphysical poem, but the soul of a novel … Intelligent without pretension, worldly without condescension, Hamilton renders both scenes and mindscapes with equal mastery of the terrain. If you've ever wondered ‘where is the postmodern Montaigne?’, now you have your answer.”
—Phong Nguyen, author of Pages from the Textbook of Alternative History and The Adventures of Joe Harper

“Masterfully conceived and effortlessly rendered, Colin Hamilton has given us a delightfully enthralling and immersive account of the power of narrative to elucidate and transform the world. I relished every page.”
—Matthew Vollmer, author of Future Missionaries of America and Permanent Exhibit

“Readers who are fans of Bruno Schulz and Jorge Luis Borges will like this contemplative novel ... it’s the heartfelt nature of The Thirteenth Month that makes it worth reading.”
—Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed

“This is a sophisticated hybrid of Borgesian imagination and heart-broken, yet dry-eyed, memoir … [Hamilton] writes with admirable grace, clarity, and appetite, whether about invisible cities or his mother’s fighting dementia.” —DeWitt Henry, Ploughshares

Select Media

Colin Hamilton on Authors Unbound (October 2024): Search wherever you find your podcasts.

Colin Hamilton presents The Discarded at Magers & Quinn (June 13, 2024)

The Discarded reviewed in the Wall Street Journal (August 22, 2024)

“Throughout the discussions of Mr. Hamilton’s delightful fabrications is a curiosity about form and significance. Sometimes the books forge uncanny correspondences, as with a field guide to insects, ‘Six-Legged Stars,’ that strangely echoes ‘Fodder,’ a Kurdish recasting of the ‘Iliad.’ But with a near-infinity of available texts, the patterns are always changing and the collection’s ultimate meaning remains elusive. Just one more book, the bibliophile perpetually believes, and my library will be complete.”

BuzzFeed: 8 Books From Smaller Publishers That Deserve Your Attention (9/10/19)
”Readers who are fans of Bruno Schulz and Jorge Luis Borges will like this contemplative novel about a narrator whose mother has dementia.”