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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.
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.
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.
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Trafik (Paperback)
Rikki Ducornet
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R371
R306
Discovery Miles 3 060
Save R65 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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From the singularly inventive mind of Rikki Ducornet, Trafik is a
buoyant voyage through outer space and inner longing, transposing
human experiences of passion, loss, and identity into a post-Earth
universe. Quiver, a mostly-human astronaut, takes refuge from the
monotony of harvesting minerals on remote asteroids by running
through a virtual reality called the Lights, chasing visions of an
elusive red-haired beauty. Her high-strung robot partner, Mic,
pilots their Wobble and entertains himself by surfing records of
the obliterated planet Earth stored on his Swift Wheel for Al
Pacino trivia, recipes for reconstituted sushi, and high fashion
trends. But when an accident destroys their cargo, Quiver and Mic
go rogue, setting off on a madcap journey through outer space
toward an idyllic destination: the planet Trafik.
Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is
traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her
story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an
orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious
courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of
Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million
ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertilizer, where
Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and
where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues
will plot a bloody revenge. The fourth element in a tetralogy of
novels - Earth (The Stain), Fire (Entering Fire), Water (The
Fountains of Neptune) and Air - The Jade Cabinet is both a riveting
novel and a reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language
and power. Following the novel is an afterword, "Waking to Eden, "
in which Ducornet reflects on the sources for her writing and on
the quartet of novels completed by The Jade Cabinet.
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.
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Text - Ur (Paperback)
Forrest Aguirre; Contributions by Brian Evenson, Rikki Ducornet
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R450
Discovery Miles 4 500
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
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
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."
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