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| Calendar of Regrets
ISBN: 9781573668194
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / The University of Alabama Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
A wildly inventive and visually rich collage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel--through time, space, narrative, and death
The poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; anchorman Dan Rather's mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolls home alone one October evening; a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers; the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon's daughter's point of view--these and other stories form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. It is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.
Lance Olsen is Professor of English at the University of Utah and author of ten novels, one new-media text, four critical studies, four short-story collections, and a textbook on fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. |
