Death by Landscape
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of the novel Oval comes a book of “fan nonfiction” about living and writing in the age of extinction
In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self.
Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She makes connections between works by such wide-ranging writers as Mark Fisher, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Octavia E. Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Kathe Koja, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Hildegard von Bingen.
What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Wilk (Oval) brings together memoir and her literary criticism and reportage in this superb collection. The essays "have been decomposed again and again, recycled and used as soil for new seeds, new ideas," she writes, and her fiery intellect touches on ecology, dystopia, the female experience, virtual reality, and fiction writing. The title piece uses Margaret Atwood's short story of the same name to explore a genre of "ecosystems fiction" that aims to remove the distinction between "human and nonhuman," while in "Funhole," Wilk juxtaposes two novels—As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem and The Cipher by Kathe Koja, both of which have plots about a "woman fall in love with a black hole"— with Anne Carson's telling of the story of Joan of Arc and the writings of Susan Sontag to investigate the limits of interpretation and what's knowable. In "Ask Before You Bite," Wilk does some gonzo journalism in the vampire larp scene, and things complicate as she goes "from larping a larper to larping" and finding "an experience of being yourself and not-yourself, in which you and your character coexist but remain distinct from each other." Taken together, the essays are elegant and powerful. This one packs a punch.
