Skin Elegies

(Paperback)

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"Olsens fascinating experiment achieves heft by the accumulation of personal and collective loss, which makes the nightmarish coda feel eerily plausible. Together, the elegant and heartbreaking set pieces prompt deep reflection on the connections between minds and bodies, and on where both are ultimately headed. Publishers Weekly (starred)

Skin Elegies uses the metaphor of mind-upload technologies to explore questions about the relationship of the cellular brain to the bytes-entity to which it gives rise; memory and our connection to the idea of pastness; refugeeism (geographical, somatic, temporal, aesthetic); and where the human might end and something else begin.

At the center stands an American couple who have fled their increasingly repressive country, now under the authoritarian rule of the Reformation Government, by transferring to a quantum computer housed in North Africa. The novels structure mimics a constellation of firing neuronsa sparking collage of many tiny narraticules flickering through the brain of one of the refugees as it is digitized. Those narraticules comprise nine larger stories over the course of the novel: the Fukushima disaster; the day the Internet was turned on; the final hours of the Battle of Berlin; John Lennons murder; an assisted suicide in Switzerland; the Columbine massacre; a woman killed by a domestic abuser; a Syrian boy making his way to Berlin; and the Challenger disaster.

With his characteristic brilliance and unrivaled uniqueness, Lance Olsen delivers an innovative, speculative, literary novel in the key of Margaret Atwood, Stanislaw Lem, and J.G. Ballard.

Reviews

"This ambitious novel juxtaposes historical tragedies with a futuristic frame. ... While these storylines can be emotionally devastating on the page (particularly the Challenger subplot), the skill with which Olsen links them together keeps things moving at an impressive pace. Readers willing to immerse themselves in this challenging novel will be left with plenty to discuss afterward. Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Olsens fascinating experiment achieves heft by the accumulation of personal and collective loss, which makes the nightmarish coda feel eerily plausible. Together, the elegant and heartbreaking set pieces prompt deep reflection on the connections between minds and bodies, and on where both are ultimately headed. Publishers Weekly (starred) "Nimble prose captures the books diverse moods and tones, from a famous murderers twisted inner ramblings to a Japanese math teachers minimalist, poetic observations about life as the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit. ... Skin Elegies is a most unusual and compelling novel about the diversity and necessity of human connection. Foreword Reviews (starred) "I cant help but adore Olsen's willingness to rescue text from the screen and set it free on the page. Mark Z. Danielewski, author ofHouse of Leaves "Cinching bands of filmic narrative tighten. You must keep reading Skin Elegies, but why Suspense. Meanwhile, take in the novels rhythms, textual harmonics, and notion of human meaning lost/gained/lost in the multiversethese also are its propellants. Its friable core is story. Lance Olsen's newest work is an amazing literary experiment." Stacey Levine, author of The Girl with Brown Fur, Frances Johnson, and My Horse and Other Stories "Skin Elegies is an enormously subtle and complex feat of the imagination, blending historical and contemporary artifacts and memories within a much larger and vaguely conspiratorial context fitting for some its late sixties setting. Shades of Pynchon and DeLillo and all Lance Olsen in this important new book." Joseph Salvatore, author of To Assume a Pleasing Shape "Not since the revolutionary novels of Rudy Wurlitzer in the 1960s and 1970s have I encountered such a stunningly ambitious and astonishing narrative bricolage as Lance Olsen's Skin Elegies. This meaty metanovel takes an esthetically and judiciously selected handful of our most vital history from 1945 to a prescient 2072, atomizes and digitizes it, then hits the SHUFFLE button before replaying the events through a set of hallucinogenic filters that Instagram would kill for. The effect is like riding a rollercoaster through a set of stargates, looping in an out of a multiverse composed of unforgettable characters and scintillant prose-poems. As fresh as the unfolding new decade, yet as eternal as the oneiric oracles of Tiresias, this book rebuilds our shared past and channels our mutual futures." --Paul Di Filippo, author of Ribofunk, Cosmocopia, The Mezcal Crack-up, and others "Reading Skin Elegies feels like watching your mind explode, translating and transfiguring its limitless possibilities into a brilliant galaxy all around and piercingly inside you. Memories spark and intensify, each flare fueled by compassion, invention, despair, horror. We are not ourselves, alone. Lance Olsens spectacularly innovative novel is a song of exaltation for the limitlessness of our mindsand a lament for limits of our bodies." Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River and The 7th Man "The curiously soulful mosaic of Skin Elegies's stories of connections missed, broken, catastrophic, and impossible is a reminder that, for all that has been and will be made of Lance Olsen's architectonic innovations, his novels are never other than deeply humane and inspirited, not to mention pure pleasure for the adventurous reader. Skin Elegies is horrific, elegiac, far-seeing, and brilliant." Gabriel Blackwell, author of CORRECTION and Babel Visions erupt throughout this magnificent text, a 21st-century metamorphoses, an Ovid come back to restore us to awe. The comparison might make other writers quail, but not Lance Olsen, the American most of the moment and farthest off the chain. Here he often works with figures from history, like the Challenger astronauts and the victims at Columbine, but even those who never made the headlines make bold and bruising new shapes of their stories. Skin Elegies shreds." John Domini, author of The Color Inside a Melon,/b> "To read Skin Elegies is to ping between verbal asterisms generated by de-selving selves, to become, in the process, de-selved yourself. What is a mind without the brain to house it Lance Olsen has written an historiographic neuronovel of residues and traces, static and sparks. Skin Elegies is a love poem from the future and a countdown to the past. It's a new structure for thinking being, now. Joanna Ruocco "Skin Elegies is the novel that the twenty-first century has been waiting for. Brilliantly conceived and impossible to sum up because it radiates in so many directions, it poignantly articulates the always-ever-present of the Now, relating experiences as disparate in time and space as John Lennon's murder, the plastic smell inside an astronauts helmet, the consciousness of mountains. With the lyricism of poetry, its clouds of association conjure a theater of memory so profound and interconnected that we feel in our guts how the past, indeed, isnt really past. Which is another way of saying, the future is already here; it just isnt finished." Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland Lance Olsens literary experiments are a constant source of wonder. He has the rare ability to reinvent not only himself but the text on the page. His innovative, interrogative prose feels uniquely suited for the crisis of our time. Held together as much by the couple in the supercomputer and the nine other narrators as by the reader herself, Olsen boldly challenges us to recognize that our ability to create meaning in the present might just be what saves us. Jarret Middleton, author of Darkansas "In Skin Elegies, Lance Olsen takes the notion of the ghost in the machine to its superlative. Grappling with the human limits of and capacities for violence, grief, tragedy, and tenderness, Skin Elegies asks us to contemplate how the self is constructed and managed in and beyond the twenty-first century. A novel of kaleidoscopic horrorand Olsen at his most haunting." Lindsey Drager, author of The Archive of Alternative Endings

Author Bio

LANCE OLSEN is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels My Red Heaven (Dzanc, 2020) and Dreamlives of Debris (Dzanc, 2017). His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Village Voice, BOMB, McSweeneys, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.