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Brian Conn
The Fixed Stars
Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season
Juxtaposing barbarity and whimsy, Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars has the tenor of a contemporary fable with nearly the same dream-like logic.
At its heart is the John’s Day celebration and the interactions of a small community afflicted by a mysterious plague. Citizens—the infected and healthy alike—are routinely quarantined and then reintegrated into society in rituals marked by a haunting brutality. In a culture that has retreated from urbanism into the pastoral, a woman who nurtures spiders and a man who spins hemp exist alongside the mass acceptance of sexual proliferation. Conn delivers a compelling portrait of a calamitous era, one tormented by pestilence, disease, violence, senseless ritual, and post-late-capitalism. An unflinching look at a world impossible to situate in time, The Fixed Stars is mythic and darkly magical.
“Brian Conn’s wonderfully perilous crossbreeding of SF and innovative prose reads like what might result if Dhalgren and A Canticle for Leibowitz engaged in salacious acts with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Fixed Stars is a funny, absurd, and beatifically strange book, one in which you simultaneously have the feeling that not one word is out of place and that everything that language brings to us opens onto a void. The Fixed Stars is the future of the future, and it is a truly outstanding debut.
–Brian Evenson
“With bits of machinery culled from post-apocalyptic science fiction, gothic horror, and ancient myth and ritual, Brian Conn has built a beguiling puzzle box of a novel. The Fixed Stars is a thorny, disjunctive fable that unfolds like a night-blooming flower. This is strange, intoxicating stuff.”
–Jedediah Berry
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Lynn K. Kilpatrick
In the House
In Lynn K. Kilpatrick’s In the House, anything can happen. A collection of shorts—lists, character sketches, directions, scripts, and instructions—In the House reveals the often conspicuous, yet frequently overlooked, dangers of relationships gone awry.
In a home suffused with fragility, or in a kitchen surrounded by knives, Kilpatrick’s men and women navigate around one another’s eccentricities with caution, highlighting the unspoken desires and veiled needs of domestic routine. In these stories those desires collide, illuminating the dangers that lurk pantries, a basements, the Miss America pageant, dioramas, or in the mind of the one you love.
“With astonishing agility Lynn Kilpatrick slits the fragile skin of identity to expose a thousand marvelously dangerous possibilities. You might be the child who disappears or the girl who becomes Miss America. Either way, your life is precarious, held in place by your own tenuous illusions and the wild confabulations of the woman on the other side of the glass, your bold, inventive neighbor.”
—Melanie Rae Thon
“In the House is a dazzlingly smart and deeply funny excavation of what goes on behind closed doors. Lynn Kilpatrick’s characters are at once bizarre and entirely recognizable and the stories she tells about them are tender and sharp and full of heart. This is a book that is brave enough to say what most of us won’t and wise enough to remind us why that kind of bravery matters.”
—Cheryl Strayed
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Rob Stephenson
Passes Through
In language that is frank and uncompromising, Rob Stephenson’s debut novel Passes Through moves forward in a rare and daring manner.
Part-journal, part-meditation on aesthetics, part-dreamscape, Passes Through investigates experience, identity, beauty, and sexuality, while complicating such distinctions as writing versus revision and imagination versus observation. It is a narrative of and about language, a narrative of and about narrative.
Stephenson throws to the wayside all of the traditional elements of fiction and in doing so composes a musical composition of obsessive consciousness and selfhood’s slippage. This haunting novel baffles and confounds on its way toward a stunning yet inevitable finale.
“Welcome to the barbwire collection (the limbo between prose and poetry). Stephenson’s Passes Through is the most exciting book I’ve read in some time. It has something to do with his pitch-perfect mastery of the underlying logic of association and his observational eye that sweeps through sex, art, death, and obsession—an obsession that may be love or that may be the desire to kill, or both. Here’s a book that succeeds through pure writing to do what only the best fiction does.”
—Samuel R. Delany, author of Dark Reflections and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“In this narrative of pure negativity, to “pass through” is to encounter the compulsive hater that may lurk in all of us. He is compellingly stalked via an accumulation of tiny precise phrases or gestures bespeaking the odd use of heartlessness, the protagonist’s and the culture’s, brilliantly juxtaposed in a stylistically and narratively intriguing work.”
—Gail Scott, author of Main Brides, Heroine, and My Paris