Roundabout: An Improvisational Fiction

Ovid Dullann works as an assistant accountant for a multinational corporation and is supporting a family of four; but abruptly, on his forty-ninth birthday, Ovid runs away from his daily work and his loving family to go on a road trip. Struck by inspiration, Ovid knows that an Author is writing about him, and will do anything to avoid acting as a protagonist of a book. But this Author will not abandon his pursuit, and vows to punish Ovid, his wayward protagonist.

Phong Nguyen is the author of two novels, Roundabout and The Adventures of Joe Harper (winner of the Prairie Heritage Book Award), and two story collections, Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History and Memory Sickness (winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award). He is the editor, with Dan Chaon and Norah Lind, of Nancy Hale: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master. His own stories have appeared in more than fifty national literary journals, including Agni, Boulevard, Iowa Review, and North American Review. He is the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri in Columbia.