Vivienne: A Novel

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"One of the year's most impressive debuts."-David Gutowski, LargeheartedBoy.com

"A skin-crawling drama about three generations of women and their relationships to one another. . . a satirical comedy that is at its core a book of poetry, or literary art."-Artnet

Did Vivienne Volker Kill Wilma Lang

This question has dogged Vivienne ever since Wilma jumped from a window to her death shortlyafter Volker stole her lover, the visionary artist Hans Bellmer, in the 1970s. Once a famous artist and fashion icon, Volker is now in her eighties and spends her days in religious contemplation in rural Pennsylvania alongside her daughter Velour Bellmer, her granddaughter Vesta Furio, her much younger boyfriend-a garbageman named Lou-and Franz, the family dog. Their quiet lives are disrupted when Vivienne's work is selected for inclusion in a high-profile retrospective called "Forgotten Women Surrealists" at the prestigious NAT Museum. However, when rumors of her past misdeeds begin to circulate and she is dropped from the show, a gallery curator enters the picture hoping to capitalize on the buzz generated by the controversy, sending the family's tensions, hopes, and dreams to a dizzyingpeak.

Set over the course of a fateful week, Viviennedeftly weaves surreal prose with a Greek chorus of internet comments and text messages, to ask the questions: what is the cost of vision, what is the price of art What connects creation and procreation, a life and an afterlife

Reviews

PRAISE FOR VIVIENNE

"An ending like a knife to the heart and a hot stone in ones guts."Underground Books

"Stylish, satirical, and inventive, contemporary yet timeless, Vivienne takes place where urgent and unanswerable questions reside, at the intersections of art, love, and the immortal soul. It is surprising, mysterious, and delightful at every turn of the page, an utterly singular story circling the life and legacy of a fascinating and larger-than-life figure. Sarah Gerard, author of True Love

Russo is acidly funny . . . a talented enough writer to leave us with her characters, their interiority.Ross Barkan

Vivienne is innovatively told and unrelentingly engaging, and one of the years most impressive debuts.David Gutowski, LargeheartedBoy.com

Vivienne is a story ofvision and creation; its author is an astrologer and mystic who deftlyintertwines the art world with that of the occult.Evening House

A skin-crawling drama about three generations of women and their relationships to one another. . . a satirical comedy that is at its core a book of poetry, or literary art.Artnet

"Vivienne is a dizzying, bold novel told in text messages, open letters by protesters, and vivacious surrealist prose."Language Arts

Few these days manage to pull off such a playful yet measured balance between the sacred and the profane as well as Fitzgerald did . . . though Emmalea Russos latest novel Vivienne does come close.Stephen Adubato, Real Clear Books

If you like your fiction offbeat, unpredictable, and a little unhinged, Vivienne is calling your name.@booksontherunway

In an instant, one of our finest poets has become one of our finest novelists. Emmalea Russo isas Leonard Cohen sangAll dressed to kill, in rags of light.Bruce Wagner author of Dead Stars

Russo's characters are vivid, alive, post-alive, carnivorous and weird: they contaminate and elevate. Vivienne is a powerful, ambiguous and magical novel that is both a work of art and a serious reflection on the risk of creation itself."Nina Power, author of What Do Men Want

Vivienne is a novel of rare vivacity and invention in a literary period not noted for visionary fictions: a vital recreation of the sheer scandal of our surreally real lives, a poets novel in the sense in which all novels worth the name should be poets novels: a work of poiesis, the inspired formation or manifestation of a new reality.John Pistelli, author of Major Arcana

A combustible alchemy of rare beauty and force. Russos lyrical prose crackles with vitality, and her story about an artists response to philistine attacks against her body of work is a triumph of literary courage and innovation."Bernard Schweizer, author of Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism

An absolutely stunning, deeply compassionate and humorous satire, set against the backdrop of contemporary cultural politics. Russo expertly weaves a story that is both tragic and comic, grounded in deep psychological and philosophical insights. Russo's ability to blend the surreal with the everyday, to infuse humor into serious subject matter, and to navigate the nuances of art and morality in the digital age is nothing short of extraordinary." Angie Speaks (aka Angie Baba-Ahmed),author of Late Stage Babylon (forthcoming) and cohost of Mystic and the Machine podcast

PRAISE FOR EMMALEA RUSSO

It has a messy epicurean sensibility which should appeal to art terrorists and ad hoc gangsters. A street credibility. It is my favorite volume of poetry written in the last however many years. . .Manuel Marrero on Confetti

Russo chronicles a desire for calm and unattachment in the face of the details of a lifea volatile relationship, the labor of gardening, a Nervous disorder . . . Readers will likely find the primary pleasures of this book in this tension, as philosophy emerges from fracture and the poems gesture toward but never perform wholeness.Publishers Weekly on G

Moving seamlessly from the finely researched to the experiential,Wave Archiveis precisely that, an accumulation of wave upon wave of Emmalea Russos thinking, being and responding through her researches upon and experiences around epilepsy.Rob McLennan on Wave Archive

Author Bio

Emmalea Russo is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, Wave Archive, Confetti,and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books.