Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet’s dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island’s seventeenth-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island’s exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza. The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet’s novel that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was described by one reviewer as “Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll.” Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.

Incarcerated for his subversive connection to the old, living world, a prisoner makes the most of his isolation in this captivating allegorical tale about tyranny, conviction, and the enduring power of imagination. Upon setting out for a morning walk with his knobby stick in hand, a young man is arrested by a robot called the Plotinus and abandoned in a cell where one beam of sunlight beckons through an air duct. Rapping his knuckles against the vent to relay his tale of woe in code, he recalls his lost love and their group’s forbidden activities; his readings in philosophy and the sciences; and sweet memories of freedom’s small pleasures. As the captive confronts his increasingly dire circumstances with rigorous optimism, the appearance of fantastical visitors and miraculous objects in his cell further blurs the line between hallucination and dystopian reality. Told with uncanny warmth and intellectual brio, The Plotinus is Rikki Ducornet’s most unforgettable story yet.

Ducornet's work grounds and is the matriarch to a younger generation of edgy, feminist women writers concerned with the body, the erotic, the alchemy of creativity, and art-she is the precursor to Maggie Nelson and others, and should animate their audiences, giving them a new dimension to books they already know and love Ducornet's essays explore the same territory that grounds her novels, and in similarly lush, carefully drawn prose. Fans of her fiction will find the book engrossing in the same way. Ducornet has a strong review track record Ducornet is an internationally exhibited painter and illustrator as well, and there's a great deal of interest here for readers interested in her as a visual artist, as well as readers of visual art criticism These essay find a place on the CHP list with authors like Kate Bernheimer, Anne Waldman, Selah Saterstrom, Brian Evenson... We have a reputation in the visionary and mythic, and she fits right in There's a lot of great cultural criticism getting attention right now (see the success of White Girls) but this book speaks to that as well as the need for writing that addresses the why and how of art making, not just the art itself.

Praise for Rikki Ducornet: "A novelist whose vocabulary sweats with a kind of lyrical heat." New York Times "Ducornet surrealist, absurdist, pure anarchist at times is one of our most accomplished writers, adept at seizing on the perfect details and writing with emotion and cool detachment simultaneously. I love her style because it is penetrating and precise but also sensual without being overwrought. You experience a Ducornet novel with all of your senses." Jeff VanderMeer "Linguistically explosive. . . . One of the most interesting American writers around." The Nation "Ducornet celebrates the playful and rebellious nature of art, and the anarchic ability of the imagination to subvert physical limitations." Times Literary Supplement A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails, and homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, the pie that disappeared off the cooling rack. Then Stub meets Billy, who takes him in, and Asthma, who enchants him, and all is found, then lost. A fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection, and emotional deformity. An artist and writer, Rikki Ducornet has illustrated books by Robert Coover, Jorge Luis Borges, Forrest Gander, and Joanna Howard. Her paintings have been exhibited widely, including, most recently, at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Salvador Allende Museum in Santiago, Chile.

The Cult of Seizure is a work of lyrical mesmerism and animal magnetism from acclaimed novelist and artist Rikki Ducornet, which displays a lush poesis and visionary soul. Jane Urquhart describes it as a "combination of the bestial and the bestiary; of terror and of tenderness." Although an earlier work it contains all the evocative tapestries of her finest novels.

With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous and the marvelous - as transmuted in the alembic of Rikki Ducornet's open-hearted vision - in literature, art, and film. For her, excess anomaly, and heterodoxy entice the imagining mind to embrace "otherness," enlarge the world, and regenerate Eden.

Ducornet playfully investigates works of literature, art, and film that create ruptures in our sense of normality. ... She] shows how the road of excess indeed leads to the palace of wisdom. Most important, however, her ability to transfix and communicate her sense of wonder becomes wondrous in itself, making these essays read with the same quirky delight as her fiction."--"Rain Taxi"Table of Contents:

Waking to Eden
Optical Terror
The Impossible Genus
On Returning from Chiapas
Alphabets and Emperors
Optical Pleasure
Haunting by Water
Mapping Paris
The Monstrous and the Marvelous
The Death Cunt of Deep Dell
Sortilege
Books of Nature
A Dream
Manifesto in Voices
Acknowledgments
Bibliography

These twelve startlingly original stories about erotic desire are the best opportunity yet for adventurous renders to discover and explore the fiction of Rikki Ducornet, who over the past three decades has created a body of work that is as daring and finely wrought as any writer's. Each of these stories centers on a pivotal erotic moment in the lives of the men and women who narrate them. Desire is awakened by such seemingly inconsequential events as a glance, a dream, a thought, or a chance encounter. Yet in each instance a life is forever changed. Only a few are overtly sexual in content, but each explores the many strange reverberations that occur when desire is present, whether acted upon or kept inside.

This year Rikki Ducornet is being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her beloved work as a novelist and essayist, but perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modernday fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction. This landmark collection of new stories is generously illustrated by T. Motley, whose gritty, fantastical cartooning explores the same post-magical realism that has been the subject of Ducornet's distinguished career.

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two men: a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla, the young and free-spirited native woman who has become the love of his life. Meanwhile, his demented son Septimus is raised by his mother in prewar Europe, seething with hatred of the father who abandoned him. He rises to power in Nazi-occupied France, where he goes mad in an obsessive pursuit of racial purity. Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans. "Linguistically explosive and socially relevant, [her]works are solid evidence that Rikki Ducornet is one of the most interesting writers around...We are living in an age of intellectual and emotional starvation that is largely without spirituality, cynical about social change and disconnected from the natural world. We need writers to look at these difficult issues in a sophisticated manner. Ducornet has done this. She is the mirror of our innermost selves. And she gives us back to ourselves--despairing , hopeful, active, contemplative, fractured but surviving, playful, even happy sometimes, and always whole...Ducornet's villains have the best lines ...one only has to think of Hitler or PolPot or any of our assorted tyrants to know that Ducornet's figures are ...taken from life."--The Nation "Entering Fire displays a cheerfully gruesome audacity and an imagination both lively and bizarre."--The New York Times "Entering Fire is about the metaphoric and potentially evil properties of language; it is about origins and motives of myth-making. This is a novel of ideas (often strange ideas) that is sustained throughout by brilliant writing."--London Sunday Times "Far from being an escapist fantasy, Entering Fire takes on some of the biggest issues of the 20th century...For sheer power, inventiveness and verbal density, [it] is the best read I've come across for a long time." --The Observer "A drastically beautiful comic writer who stitches sentences together as if Proust had gone into partnership with Lenny Bruce."--City Limits "...imaginative and unbridled fantasy."--Le Monde "...an imagination and a style as captivating as it is devastating."--Lire "Unlike anything you've ever read before."--L'Express Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans.

A beautifully surreal masquerade. World Fantasy Award Winning editor Forrest Aguirre brings you fantastical fiction from the most imaginative minds of our time. Contributors to this hallucinogenic spectacle include Brian Evenson, recipient of an O. Henry Prize and an NEA fellowship along with Lance Olsen, a Philip K. Dick Award finalist and Associate Editor at American Book Review. This anthology also features Rikki Ducornet who has had an L.A. Times Book of the Year has been a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and Terese Svoboda whose first novel was one of SPIN's ten best novels of 1994 and recently received an O. Henry Prize.

Do Midwesterners have a peculiar way of looking at the world? Is there something not quite right about the way they see things? For such a normal place, the heartland has produced some writers who take a most individual approach to storytelling. And the result to the delight of readers everywhere has been stories that reveal the mystery, joy, and enchantment in the most ordinary and incidental moments of life. These 33 exceptional tales showcase the peculiarly wonderful vision of some of the region s best-known or soon-to-be-celebrated writers. Each invites its readers to see the world through different eyes and see it anew."

The author's training as a geologist influences the themes and forms of the poems and the single essay in this book. Often his poetic forms are determined by rock characteristics, even when the concerns of the poem are intensely human. For instance, a poem about a set of perceived relationships at twilight from the Crystal section titled "yellow quartz" breaks into six lines and references the passage of light because quartz crystals are pellucid and hexagonal. In another sequence, "Line of Descent," sharply shifting lines of poetry enact the cutbacks and bends of the path into the Grand Canyon by which father and son descend through lines of sediment and lines of story along the bloodline that ties them together. Without calling attention to themselves, such forms underpin the strong emotional terrain upon which all the poems, whether focused on erotic love, fatherhood, the histories of empire, or the dialogue between scientific rationalism and poetic imagination, are situated. With an eye toward what we stand on literally, Gander concentrates our attention toward what we stand on and for in our various relationships with others and with the world

Winner of the fC2 Catherine doctorow innovative fiction Prize. A new collection of stories by bestselling author Michelle Richmond, Hum presents a cautionary political fable, a celebration of the complexities of marriage, and a meditation on modern-day alienation. Thirteen years after the publication of her first story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond returns with Hum, a collection of ten stories that examine love, lust, and loyalty from surprising angles. In "Hum," a young couple that is paid to live in a house filled with surveillance equipment becomes "quietly lost to each other," as the wife's infatuation with the subject of their surveillance turns to obsession. In "Medicine," a woman grieving over the death of her sister finds her calling as a manual medical caregiver. In "Boulevard," a couple who has been trying to have a child for seven years finds themselves in an unnamed country at the height of a revolution, summoned there by the enigmatic H. "Scales," the story of a woman who falls in love with a man whose body is covered with scales, parses the intersection of pain and pleasure. The narrator of "Lake" must choose whether to walk in the foot- steps of her famous grandfather, The Great Amphibian, who disappeared while performing a feat of daring in Lake Michigan. What does it mean to be heroic? How much should one sacrifice in the name of love? These questions and more are explored with tenderness, wit, and unerring precision in Hum.