With the literary mastery of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, award-winning author Lance Olsen presents a lyrical imagining of an artist’s solitary, disembodied life, as dreamlike as it is captivating.At the end of his life in 1973, Henry Darger’s mind is a series of recollections: of his decades spent working as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals; of his nights writing and making hundreds of collages that would never be seen until after his...

Nietzsche's Kisses is the story of Friedrich Nietzsche's last mad night on earth. 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, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, ...

• A Fulbright Scholar and recipient of a Guggenheim Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize• Chair of University of Utah's Fiction Collective Two• Author’s work has appeared in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, BOMB, McSweeney’s, and Best American Non-Required Reading• Director of Creative Writing at the University of Utah• Strong personal connections and a decade of work...

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 rea...

For decades, Lance Olsen has been a wellspring of literary innovation, sophistication, and elan. With more than thirty books to his name, he consistently pushes the limits of narrative and aspires for the New. SHRAPNEL: CONTEMPLATIONS brings together some of Olsen’s most compelling nonfiction from the twenty-first century. In this collection of essays and interviews, he discusses topics ranging from the philosophy of contemporary writing and the corporatization of the literary scene to ent...

A fictional meditation on time and experience—part journal, part meditation, part dreamscapeIn 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 provocatively complicating such distinctions as writing versus revision and imagina...

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 deathThe 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...

"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 cellul...

Girl Imagined by Chance is a critifictional novel about a couple who find themselves having created a make-believe daughter (and soon a make-believe life to accompany her) in order to appease their friends, family, and the culture of reproduction. Structured around twelve photographs from a single roll of film, the book explores the nature of photography and the questions that nature raises about the notions of the simulated and the real, the media-ization of consciouness, origina...

A tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacleSewing Shut My Eyes is a tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacle—nine darkly satiric out-takes of America tubing. Visions of mid-air synchronicities, robotic cockroaches, cyborg poets and one monstrous HDTV, all rendered in a hypo-manic style of electrified clauses and full-throttle patter. Here's Mona Sausalito, self-proclaimed "fricking gorgeous" bad-little-girl for Escort a la Mode and, on the side, Neogoth lyricis...

Head in Flames is a collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, & quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font & aesthetic/political/existential space.The first belongs to Vincent van Gogh on the day he shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890. The second to Theo van Gogh (Vincent's brother's great grandson) on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004. The third to Moham...

With fictions from four previous collections, as well as eight new fictions covering the past decade, Olsen has put together a fantastic overview of his lengthy and critically acclaimed history as an author.