The Coast of Everything by Guillermo Stitch. Sagging Meniscus Press. 2026.
Reviewed by Jeff Chon
Great writers constantly swim against the tide. There’s great risk in leaving the safety of the coastline, the comfort of breaths unencumbered by sea spray, the warmth of the sunlight on skin. In between strokes, they look over their shoulder and see the shoreline get smaller and smaller, but once they reach a certain point they stop, and they float, and they realize they can see everything. From here, the coast no longer looks small. It looks complete.
With his novel, The Coast of Everything, author Guillermo Stitch swims against a particularly challenging tide. For starters, the general public are loath to read 747 pages of anything these days. This is just a sad fact of our times, and the times before this one, and most likely the time before that. But our particular culture was the one that created the label TLDR to dismiss both long-windedness and expansive elaboration (unless it’s presented as a long-form video essay). We compare literature of this length to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which has become short-hand for performative (as if we somehow can’t fathom anyone enjoying David Foster Wallace) or self-indulgent (which, if we’re being honest, describes any good reading experience).
There’s also the structure to consider. The Coast of Everything is a novel told in concentric circles. The reader makes their way to the center of the circle and then works their way back out. It is a novel-within a novel-within a novel-within a novel – literal novels nested within one another, a Dickensian plethora of characters to keep track of (Charles Dickens is a character in The Coast of Everything, to boot).
From the length, to the structure, to the abundance of moving parts, it could be argued Stitch has placed barriers between himself and the reader. But the point Stitch seems to be making here is that none of these are actually barriers. The length is simply the duration the story needs in order to breathe. The structure is the same structure we’ve used since the early days of storytelling, that we’ve simply become numb to from years of scrolling and swiping. And moving parts are essential for any great engine to propel itself along. This is simply what good storytelling has always been. In short, The Coast of Everything is an ode to storytelling and a counterstrike against the shortened attention spans of our troubled times.
One hell of a tide to swim against.
The novel’s framing device concerns Clara, a quadriplegic girl in a Germanic village, who has a knack for telling stories. Because she’s bedridden, we’re told she’s an authority on ceilings. Staring at the ceiling all day is how she’s able to access her imagination, to “map worlds” (the idea of creating worlds on blank slates recurs throughout the book). Like many of the characters in this novel, Clara is a storyteller, and as she’s being carried up a giant hill by her friends, she tells them a story to rouse their strength and keep them moving up that hill, thus bringing us to the stories-within-stories-within-stories motif:
- The Tale of the Enchanted Road: Just as Clara is our framing device, The Tale of the Enchanted Road frames the tale she tells her friends. It’s the story of a Black Mirror-esque future where literature (content), and the act of reading itself, is used to fuel vehicles. As it’s now a proprietary item, literature that doesn’t conform (doesn’t keep you “on track,” so to speak) is outlawed.
- The Tale of the Porter and the Gin: From here meet Vince, one of the “terrorists” who is keeping alive the literature considered problematic in this dystopia. An aspiring writer himself, an act punishable by death, Vince is visited by the ghost of Charles Dickens, who humorously presents him with his latest manuscript.
- The Tale of the Isle of Truth: The lost Dickens manuscript is a science fiction novel (told with a Dickensian flourish) set on a remote outpost where a tyrannical government tasks the inhabitants with storing literature, which is considered “hazmat.” They come across a recording of a man telling a story to his dying wife.
- The Tale of the Three Voyages: The story the man tells his wife is of Liam Téad, an Irish beach bum who fancies himself a detective like Marlowe. Circumstances lead to his employment by a tech heiress and he treks across Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt on a search for his client’s lost sister.
From here, Clara slowly brings her friends back through each layer the way a scuba diver deliberately rises to avoid the bends. The novel, particularly The Tale of Three Voyages, owes a great debt to One Thousand and One Nights, from the structure to the unadulterated love of storytelling (not to mention the sheer horniness of it all). To underscore how the roots of Scheherazade’s plight runs deeply through this novel, our inept gumshoe Téad is forced to tell a story to an armed assailant in order to keep him from pulling the trigger.
Stories matter, Téad is telling us. They both solve or address problems, and that’s comforting.
As they did for Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, stories keep us alive. They save us from death, which in the case of this book is both the literal death and the slow, spiritual death we’re all suffering through currently. In The Coast of Everything, stories are told to move people forward, to challenge notions of what stories even are, to fight against the proverbial dying of the light.
Stories keep us alive, Stitch argues, because stories are brimming with life. They are wild, untamable things, and the fascist regimes and corporate interests in the novel learn the folly of trying to control them. Stories cannot be contained, even by the teller, as they change once they’re out there in the world. Stories are, in some ways, unknowable, and therein lies their power and their draw.
In one particular passage, a man presses an ink nib onto a sheet of paper and watches the ink spread into random patterns as it soaks into the fibrous paper. “To be ink is to be what is,” he tells us. “To be paper is to be what is not yet, or what is not yet known.”
It is this unknown that compels us to swim against the tide. This is why Clara is able to map worlds on her ceiling. Another character stares into the blue sky in order to conjure her last story, while another leaps from a precipice to show how endings make a story of what came before. The paper, that blank space, that flashing cursor in the corner of the screen – Stitch is showing us the possibility of stories here. He wants the reader to absorb stories, to take them with us wherever we go, to realize that we are stories.
Jeff Chon is the author of the short story collection, This Is the Afterlife, and the novel, Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun, praised in The New York Times, The Irish Times, The Scotland Herald, and The Times of London.