Cosmogony
Stories
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
An energetic, witty collection of stories where the supernatural meets the anomalies of everyday life--deception, infidelity, lost cats, cute memes, amateur pornography, and more.
There are analogies between being female and being left-handed, I think, or being an animal.
A woman answers a Craigslist ad (to write erotic diaries for money). A woman walks onto a tennis court (from her home at the bottom of the ocean). A woman goes to the supermarket and meets a friend's husband (who happens to be an immortal demon). A woman goes for a run (and accidentally time travels).
Cosmogony takes accounts of so-called normal life and mines them for inconsistencies, deceptions, and delights. Incorporating a virtuosic range of styles and genres (Wikipedia entry, phone call, physics equation, encounters with the supernatural), these stories reveal how the narratives we tell ourselves and believe are inevitably constructed, offering a glimpse of the structures that underlie and apparently determine human existence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ives (Loudermilk) grapples with information overload while exploring her characters' deeply personal interiority in this inventive collection. Here, Mallarmé meets Craigslist, as a young translator takes a job writing the diaries of erotic online models in "A Throw of the Dice," a reference to the symbolist poet's magnum opus. In "Recognition of This World Is Not the Invention of It," a retreat for coworkers leads to a game of Murder, and then takes on additional layers of darkness as the narrator reflects on her fraught relationship with her mother and contemplates suicide. The narrator of the title story considers Gottfried Leibniz's theory of monads (the building blocks of the universe) while semi-dating an angel who works for an IT company. The fascinating, dialogue-heavy "Scary Sites" surfs between many topics, from Saturday Night Live to violence in literature, to Sarah Huckabee Sanders's "Perfect Smoky Eye." The structurally ingenious "Guy" takes the form of a casual stroll through Wikipedia's hodgepodge of entries on Guy Fawkes and the Napoleonic Wars before settling into a startlingly intimate portrait of an affair. Through juxtaposition and collage, these stories illuminate the trickier fringes of life right now.
