FC2

More at http://www.fc2.org

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

————–
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

—————
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

Listen to the review.

Kate Bernheimer, author of two FC2 novels (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold) and member of FC2’s Board of Directors has just had her first children’s book, The Girl in The Castle inside The Museum (Random House) named as one of the “Best Books of 2008″ by Publishers Weekly.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6610357.html

Fall 2008 Releases

** The Bruise by Magdalena Zurawski **

The Bruise is a novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M-deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one which has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not go away, forcing M– to confront her own existential fears. M–’s wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination is that of the writer, breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. With rhythmic language and allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski reclaims the university bildugsroman as an intelligent and moving form.

** Ledfeather by Stephen Graham Jones **

After burning up all the blacktop New Mexico had to offer with The Fast Red Road and rewriting the Great Plains into a place both more and less Indian than they already were with The Bird is Gone , Stephen Graham Jones has now brought the story up to Montana. And it’s leaner than it’s ever been. Not because it’s about the Blackfeet, who have been schooled by the government on how to starve, but because this time the story is just about one Indian boy, standing in the middle of the road at night, trying so hard to change history. And these next moments, the headlights already throwing his shadow miles behind him, across all of America, these next moments are going to decide everything. Balanced on the knife edge of winter like the Blackfeet have always been, a single act can resonate for generations. This is Ledfeather. The story of Doby Saxon, standing in that road just outside Browning, his hands balled into fists, the reservation wheeling all around him like he’s what the last hundred years have been hurtling towards.

And maybe he is.

** La Medusa by Vanessa Place **

La Medusa is a polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness. At the heart of the whole floats Medusa, an androgynous central awareness that anchors the novel throughout. La Medusa is at once the city of Los Angeles, with its snaking freeways and serpentine shifts between reality and illusion, and a brain—a modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions.

Vanessa Place’s characters—a trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among others—are borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain. Her expert ventriloquism and explosive imagination anchor this epic narrative in language that is fierce and vibrant, a penetrating cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles and a cross-section of the modern mind.