“Packed into Lift Your Right Arm are conundrums, Abbott-and-Costello dialogues, nonsense narratives and other playful—sometimes hilarious, sometimes subversive—assaults on logic. To Gödel, Escher, and Bach we might consider adding Peter Cherches.”Billy Collins

“Peter Cherches is one of the stingiest writers going—stingy with words, that is. He won’t use ten words if he can get away with five, and he won’t write a novel if he can convey its pith in a page. This book, then, is the equivalent of a whole shelf of books. Read slowly, it can last you for years.”Luc Sante

“I swear, Peter Cherches is a bloody Boy Scout, blazing trail after trial after Tenderfoot trooper Kafka in this new manual of terrifying trifles, Lift Your Right Arm. He over qualifies for the merit badge of knotting knotty knots. His hitched fictions—bent and twisted, worsted and loopy—articulate the inarticulate. They tie you up; they tie you off; they tie-dye you. These skeins of embroidered language fray, frayed and fraying till the bitter bitterest end.”Michael Martone
Author of Four for a Quarter and Michael Martone

“One of the innovators of the short short story, Cherches (Condensed Book) returns with a collection whose pieces linger in the void somewhere between poetry and prose. Consisting of five sequences of loosely connected minimalist stories—few of which go on for longer than a page—these “novellas”, though distinct, keep returning to certain overarching themes: the reality of death, the difficulty of expressing subjective perspective, and the failures of language.”Publishers Weekly