DREAMLIVES OF DEBRIS

Name: DREAMLIVES OF DEBRIS
Author: Lance Olsen
ISBN: 978-1-938604-58-4

by Lance Olsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2017

Olsen finds a new spin on one of the oldest stories out there, illuminating some of the more horrific aspects and pressing...

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In Olsen’s hypnotic, experimental retelling of the Minotaur legend, a familiar story is given a powerful contemporary touchstone.

Thousands of years after it was first told, the story of the Minotaur is one that still holds the capacity to surprise and unnerve readers. The central character of this novel is named Debris, the Minotaur reimagined as a diminutive girl dwelling in a strange labyrinth. Olsen’s powerfully told novel reads, at times, like a collection of monologues, primarily told from Debris’ perspective but periodically interrupted by voices from antiquity, accounts of explorers and visionaries, and testimonials from the modern surveillance state. It’s a narrative in which J.G. Ballard and Julian Assange can coexist with Icarus and Daedalus and where the amorphous nature of bodies in mythology takes on a newfound contemporary resonance. Gradually, the story being told here begins to incorporate larger concerns, from the societal abuse of women to the way technology can erode identities to the question of whether our world might be a simulation by some other advanced society. Olsen frequently heads into challenging territory, whether through the juxtaposition of current events with revisionist takes on mythology or through the haunting, fragmented manner in which the story plays out. A reference late in the novel to the work of filmmakers Werner Herzog and David Lynch suggests that not all of Olsen’s aesthetic reference points are literary, and it also suggests a larger structure in which experimental techniques are used to achieve a deeper emotional truth. In this way, the novel manages to be simultaneously experimental and accessible.

Olsen finds a new spin on one of the oldest stories out there, illuminating some of the more horrific aspects and pressing questions of the modern world.

Pub Date: March 13, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-938604-58-4

Page Count: 296

Publisher: Dzanc

Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ABSOLUTE AWAY
by Lance Olsen

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SKIN ELEGIES
by Lance Olsen

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MY RED HEAVEN
by Lance Olsen

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EAST OF EDEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1952

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

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Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.

Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952

ISBN: 0142004235

Page Count: 616

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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STEINBECK IN VIETNAM
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden

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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott

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AMERICA AND AMERICANS
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.