This fascinating study of literary theory is the first work of its kind to examine the intersection of fantasy and postmodernism, and to analyze contemporary fantasy writers comparatively. After carefully developing working definitions of postmodernism and fantasy, the author goes on to analyze works by various postmodernist fantasy writers. Olsen's approach is eclectic, bringing to each text or textual complex those forces he feels most interestingly stir up its sediment--be they biographical, structural, psychoanalytic, philosophical, reader-response, or otherwise. Finally he argues that postmodern fantasy is the literary equivalent of deconstructionism, for it interrogates all we take for granted about language and experience, giving these no more than shifting and provisional status. It may be seen as a mode of radical skepticism that believes only in the possiblilty of total intelligibility.

A prismatic, imaginative exploration of David Bowie’s last daysAn intricate collage-novel fusing and confusing fact and imagination, Always Crashing in the Same Car is a prismatic exploration of David Bowie through multiple voices and perspectives—the protean musician himself, an academic trying to compose a critical monograph about him, friends, lovers, musicologists, and others in Bowie’s orbit. At its core beat questions about how we read others, how we are read by them, how (if at all) we can tell the past with something even close to accuracy, what it feels like being the opposite of young and still committed to bracing, volatile innovation. Set during Bowie’s last months—those during which he worked on his acclaimed final album Black Star while battling liver cancer and the consequences of a sixth heart attack—yet washing back and forth across his exhilarating, kaleidoscopically costumed life, Always Crashing in the Same Car enacts a poetics of impermanence, of art, of love, of truth, even of death, that apparently most permanent of conditions.

"Olsen's 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 novel's structure mimics a constellation of firing neurons-a 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 Lennon's 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.

Praise for Lance Olsen's Fiction: ""In the world of contemporary fiction, Lance Olsen is a rock star."" -Brooklyn Rail

Ideal for individual or classroom use, ARCHITECTURES OF POSSIBILITY theorizes and questions the often unconscious assumptions behind such traditional writing gestures as temporality, scene, and characterization; offers various suggestions for generating writing that resists, rethinks, and/or expands the very notion of narrativity; visits a number of important concerns/trends/obsessions in current writing (both on the page and off); discusses marketplace (ir)realities; hones critical reading and manuscript editing capabilities; and strengthens problem-solving muscles from brainstorming to literary activism. Exercises and supplemental reading lists challenge authors to push their work into self-aware and surprising territory. In addition, ARCHITECTURES OF POSSIBILITY features something entirely lacking in most books about creative writing: more than 40 interviews with contemporary innovative authors, editors, and publishers (including Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Brian Evenson, Shelley Jackson, Ben Marcus, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Steve Tomasula, Deb Olin Unferth, Joe Wenderoth, and Lidia Yuknavitch) working in diverse media, providing significant insights into the multifaceted worlds of experimental writers' writing.

"Anxious Pleasures" takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting and sad comic novella, "The Metamorphosis, " and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surrounded Gregor Samsa during his plight. All the familiar characters are here, including the hysterical mother, stern father, faithless sister, and the pragmatic household cook. But we are also introduced to, among others, the would-be author downstairs who daydreams of the narrative he may someday compose and a young woman in contemporary London reading Kafka's slim book for the first time.
Or do they all comprise a few of the disturbing dreams from which Gregor is about to snap awake one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin? In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" and John Gardner's "Grendel, " Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but, too, a celebration, augmentation, complication, and devoted unwriting of a momentously influential text.

Locked in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar, the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers hovers between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present, reliving his brief love affair with feminist Lou Salome, his stormy association with Richard Wagner's musical genius, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, his rabidly anti-Semitic sister dedicated to assuring her brother's legacy by distorting his philosophy into a cult attractive to the rising proto- Nazi movement. Here is a portrait of the Nietzsches we know and the Nietzsches we don't, the one who killed off God, unmoored language from the things to which it refers, and invented the notions of the Ubermensch and Eternal Recurrence, as well as the one evincing a fragile and hyper-sensitive intensity that contrasts eerily with the celebration of strength and the disparagement of consciousness in his own writings. His titanic ego, suppressed, squelched, and sealed up within him, all but unknown to his acquaintances, creates a maniacal and raging giant inside his own skull that is mysterious and unnerving, when it is not simply scary, sad, and haunting. Both stylistically and formally innovative, the prose in ""Nietzsche's Kisses"" is surprising and rich. The result is a vivid, complex experience of Nietzsche's criti-fictional imagination, internal dividedness, and existential alienation. Yet, for all its technical and philosophical play, this book never relinquishes its profound empathy for what it means to be human during our final hours.

Lance Olsen's sixth novel, Girl Imagined by Chance, is a formally innovative, intensely lyrical novel about the way fictions can take over our lives. It tells the story of an unnamed cyber-journalist and his photographer-wife, Reyla, who, childless and approaching middle age, abruptly move to a small Idaho town, abandoning Reyla's eighty-nine year old grandmother. Thus, Genia enters the world, a baby girl conceived only in imagination. However, to her creators' surprise, Genia proves as needy as every child. Soon they are scrambling to nurture and feed and protect their fiction and facing serious questions about the existential anxieties that compelled them to flee to Idaho in the first place. At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. Its prevailing metaphor and structural device, the photograph, examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The individual past, seemingly stable and fixed, turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future, and the body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces. If Jean Baudrilard, Helene Cixous, and Clarice Lispector had collaborated on a novel, Girl Imagined by Chance would be the result.

"Theories of Forgetting" is concerned with how words matter, the materiality of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in the digital age--right from its use of two back covers (one "upside down" and one "right-side up") that allow the reader to choose which of the novel's two narratives to privilege.
"Theories of Forgetting" is a narrative in three parts. The first is the story of Alana, a filmmaker struggling to complete a short documentary about Robert Smithson's famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the Great Salt Lake meets the desert. Alana falls victim to a pandemic called The Frost, whose symptoms include an increasing sensation of coldness and growing amnesia. The second involves Alana's husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance across Jordan while on a trip both to remember and to forget Alana's death. The third involves marginalia added to Hugh's section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic living in Berlin. Aila discovers a manuscript by her father after his disappearance and tries to make sense of it by means of a one-sided "dialogue" with her brother, Lance.
Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana's narrative runs across the top of the page, from back to front, while Hugh's and his daughter's tale runs "upside down" across the bottom of the page, from front to back. How a reader initially happens to pick up "Theories of Forgetting "determines which narrative is read first, and thereby establishing the reader's meaning-making of the novel.