Bøger udgivet af Dzanc Books

Winner of the Dzanc Prize for FictionA work of brilliant and innovative historical fiction, Asylum delves into the disturbing and seductive relationship between a young hysteric named Augustine and renowned nineteenth-century French neurologist J.M. Charcot. As Charcot risks his career to investigate the controversial disease of hysteria, Augustine struggles to make him acknowledge their interdependence and shared desires¿until a new lover, M., drives them all to the brink of fracture.Drawing upon the medical photography, hypnotic states, and ¿grand demonstrations¿ that accompanied Charcot¿s research, Asylum traces the deterioration of the dynamic between doctor and patient as they transform from mutually entranced creators to jealous and spurned paramours, to fierce rivals, and finally to bitter enemies. Told in lyrical, feverish, and sometimes delirious prose, Nina Shope delivers a captivating narrative at the crossroads of Mary Shelley and Donna Tartt.

A brilliant novel-in-stories from award-winning author Robert LopezIn an uncanny, distorted version of New York City, a man rides the subway through the chaos of an ordinary commute. He may have a gun in his pocket. He may be looking for someone¿a woman named Esperanza.Between stops, we shuttle back and forth through time and see a man who stands in traffic, the same man seizing and shuddering on a sidewalk, an institution where the man is housed with other undesirables (or troublemakers?), a neighborhood where all the residents have forgotten their names. Over everything looms the specter of a nameless menace, a pervasive sense that something¿more than just a ride¿is coming to an end. With Robert Lopez¿s signature innovation, A Better Class of People delivers a network of stories interconnected and careening like subway tunnels through the realities of modern America: immigration, gun violence, police brutality, sexual harassment, climate change, and the point of fracture at which we find ourselves, where reality and perception are indistinguishable.

Winner of the 2020 Dzanc Short Story Collection PrizeIn Water and Blood, the nameless narrator, a survivor of abuse, tries on other women's stories like she is trying on their clothes. There is the nun who learns to swim decades after witnessing her biological sister's drowning in the Ohio River. The rape victim whose deathbed statement is interwoven with the imagined voice of the rapist. The young girl who is sent to stay with her alcoholic grandfather while her parents care for a sick child. Out of scraps of reclaimed history and imagined memories, the narrator creates a garment of women's stories for herself-overlapping the seams between fact and fiction, doing what women do: cleaning and restitching the wounds of trauma, making a life with the things that are left over after everyone else has taken what they need.

"e;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."e; -Publishers Weekly (starred)Skin Elegies uses the metaphor of mind-upload technologies to explore questions about the relationship of the cellular brain to the bytes-entity to which it gives rise; memory and our connection to the idea of pastness; refugeeism (geographical, somatic, temporal, aesthetic); and where the human might end and something else begin.At the center stands an American couple who have fled their increasingly repressive country, now under the authoritarian rule of the Reformation Government, by transferring to a quantum computer housed in North Africa. The novel's structure mimics a constellation of firing neurons-a sparking collage of many tiny narraticules flickering through the brain of one of the refugees as it is digitized. Those narraticules comprise nine larger stories over the course of the novel: the Fukushima disaster; the day the Internet was turned on; the final hours of the Battle of Berlin; John Lennon's murder; an assisted suicide in Switzerland; the Columbine massacre; a woman killed by a domestic abuser; a Syrian boy making his way to Berlin; and the Challenger disaster.With his characteristic brilliance and unrivaled uniqueness, Lance Olsen delivers an innovative, speculative, literary novel in the key of Margaret Atwood, Stanislaw Lem, and J.G. Ballard.

"e;Ebullient ... Daitch finds stimulating connections and writes with sharp irony and joy. This offers delights on every page."e; -Publishers WeeklyAward-winning author Susan Daitch returns with Siege of Comedians, a novel in triptych told through interconnected narrative threads pulled taut by linked crimes.In the first piece, an American forensic sculptor, reconstructing the faces of three victims receives a midnight, visit from a man who threatens her life unless she alters the faces she's almost completed. The twists and turns of the mystery lead her to a new life, working with forensic archeologists at a site near the Prater amusement park in Vienna. In the second section, an accent coach discovers that the man implicated in the death of his girlfriend in 1970s Buenos Aires was once a censor and Assistant Minister of Propaganda in Vienna during World War II. When bodies start turning up under the former Propaganda offices, some date from the war period-but others are much older, their origins going back to the Ottoman siege of Vienna. In the final arc, in the aftermath of the last battle between the Austrians and the Turks, a local businesswoman finds three displaced women from Istanbul-former wives of the sultan-wandering in Vienna and gives them shelter in her brothel, located on the site of the future Ministry of Propaganda.Connected across time by intersecting crimes and themes of language, cultural assimilation, and nationalist conflicts, Siege of Comedians, part political thriller, part comic noir, reflects on aspects of the current refugee crisis, human trafficking, and identity.

A long-ago kidnaping case all but abandoned resurfaces, yet its memory of lives put aside almost screens itself with a population of new life. Neighborhoods of New York, of Brooklyn Heights, a larger uncertain and disturbing America of the 1960s, this fable of a man¿s obsession revisits people as clues while at the center, with deceptive scope, his temporarily estranged wife¿s voice gathers and regathers what it is that he and she and their child have curiously going for them. All these unfolding circles of understanding in a mixed language distinctly American, by turns satirical, lyrical, eccentric, even a solvent at times simplifying the prevailingly urban as bucolic. A city pastoral Joseph McElroy called his second novel when it first appeared in 1969; now, a half century later, we may experience in Hind¿s Kidnap a society reaching outward almost like a planet at risk, persons who would be dekidnaped to become ends in themselves, fiction as prophecy.

RE Katz's And Then the Gray Heaven centers on Jules, whose partner B has recently died in a freak accident. Confronting the red tape of the hospital, the dissociation and cruelty of B's family, and the unimaginable void now at the center of their lives, Jules and new friend Theo embark on a road trip to bury two-thirds of B's ashes in the places they most belong. Along the way, Katz delves into their relationship and their life stories-Jules' rise from abandoned baby origins through the Florida foster care system, and B's artistic transformation, surrounded by kindred spirits who helped them realize it was possible to be regarded as a human and not as a body.Delving into what it means to try to be alive to your own pain and the pain of others under late capitalism, And Then the Gray Heaven explores the themes of queer grief and affection, queer failure, burial as hero's journey, and the grotesqueries of artistic determination within and beyond the institutions that define our lives.

In the Event of Contact chronicles characters profoundly affected by physical connection, or its lack. Among them, a scrappy teen vies to be the next Sherlock Holmes; an immigrant daughter must defend her decision to remain childless; a guilt-ridden woman is haunted by the disappearance of her childhood friend; a cantankerous crossing guard celebrates getting run over by a truck; an embattled priest with dementia determines to perform a heroic, redemptive act, if he can only remember how; and a young girl navigates crippling aversion to touch, even from her sisters. Amidst backgrounds of trespass and absence, the indelible characters of In the Event of Contact seek renewed belief in themselves, recovery, and humanity.

Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Prize for FictionSet in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women-niece, aunt, and stowaway-and an improbable road trip. Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan-with a hound in tow-set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiqui and the desert of Georgia O'Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they've known. Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave's dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived. With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth-and herself-the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.

With Death and So Forth, esteemed writer and editor Gordon Lish returns with a new book of scintillating short fiction. With his trademark precision, wit, and wiliness, Lish writes outside the margins and around the edges of the death, loss, and the fractiousness and fragmentation of language. Death and So Forth collects a number of Lish's acclaimed stories and introduces eight new fictions, including a tribute to Denis Johnson and so many others lost in the course of a long life. Brilliant and sharp-eyed, this is a treasure for fans of Gordon Lish, new and lifelong.

A relationship ends in the space between [ ]. Abe Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe Two stroll the river in the afterlife, debating a second death. Two boys navigate jazz, baseball, and growing up in the second between the pitch and the swing. And a man from Living Dangerously sets off across the ocean on a pile of lobster traps, seeking the truth of the smoke on the wind. With If You [ ], author Colin Fleming breaks the unwritten rule of the short story collection. In over thirty different styles, Fleming delivers a punk rock triple album in book form‿compositions that display a dizzying range of fearless artistry, from horror to hyper-experimental to a story disguised as a grocery list. Together, these pieces resonate with unexpected chords, exploring the breadth of human experience and affirming that that narrative is everywhere, if we are able and willing to see it.

A hypnotic, brutal, and unstoppable coming-of-age story echoing from within the aftershocks set off by the American Indian boarding schools of generations past, fanned by the flames of nearly fifteen years of service in the Armed Forces, exposing a series of inescapable prisons and the invisible scars of attempted erasure. When he learns his father is dying, David Tromblay ponders what will become of the monster's legacy and picks up a pen to set the story straight. In sharp and unflinching prose, he recounts his childhood bouncing between his father, who wrestles with anger, alcoholism, and a traumatic brain injury; his grandmother, who survived Indian boarding schools but mistook the corporal punishment she endured for proper child-rearing; and his mother, a part-time waitress, dancer, and locksmith, who hides from David's father in church basements and the folded-down back seat of her car until winter forces her to abandon her son on his grandmother's doorstep. For twelve years, he is beaten, burned, humiliated, locked in closets, lied to, molested, seen and not heard, until his talent for brutal violence meets and exceeds his father's, granting him an escape. Years later, David confronts the compounded traumas of his childhood, searching for the domino that fell and forced his family into the cycle of brutality and denial of their own identity.

In stylish, intimate, and devastating short flashes, The Doctor's Wifetells the story of three generations of a family in the Pacific Northwest.Winner of the Dzanc Short Story Contest, Luis Jaramillo's The Doctor's Wife pushes the limits of what a short story collection can be. In stylish, intimate, and devastating short flashes, Jaramillo chronicles the small domestic moments, tragic losses, and cultural upheavals faced by three generations of a family in the Pacific Northwest, creating a moving portrait of an American family and the remarkable woman at its center.

Astounding and impressionistic, My Red Heaven imagines the intersection of historic figures - artists, actors, physicists, and autocrats - on a single day in Berlin, 1927.

We Five tells the story of five young female friends and co-workers through the voices of five different authors, the story unfolding against five distinct historic backdrops. The driving conceit is that an anonymously authored manuscript from the mid-1860s (perhaps the work of Dickens contemporary Elizabeth Gaskell) was discovered and later published. Over the succeeding decades four other authors choose to retell this story in their own time and in their own way. The last author has now gone a step further: she has assembled all five versions into a literary pastiche which cycles chapter-by-chapter through the different versions as the central narrative progresses. The result is a novel about five young women pursued by five young men of predatory purpose, which takes place alternatively in a small mill town outside of Manchester, England in 1859; in San Francisco on the eve of the 1906 earthquake and fire; in Sinclair Lewiss fictional Zenith, Winnemac in 1923; in London during the Blitz of autumn, 1940; and in a small town in northern Mississippi in 1997. In the first book We Five are seamstresses; in the next they are department store sales clerks; in the next, they sing in the choir of a popular female evangelist; in the next, they work in an ordinance factory outside of London; and in the final version, they are cocktail waitresses in a Mississippi River casino. The books climax is a dramatic collision of all five incarnations of the story: an incident of mass hysteria arising from a solar storm in 1859, the 1906 San Francisco quake, a fire in the evangelists newly built temple in 1923, the 1940 Balham Underground station bombing and flooding, and a tornado in rural 1997 Mississippi.

In eighteen thematically linked stories, Colin Fleming explores the ways in which relationships end, with a focus on the void a loved one leaves behind. In Fire with Legs, the inhabitants of a noise machine discuss the end of a previous relationship, and the life that went with it. In Playing in Room B, an amateur videographer searches for his vanished wife in his movies, wondering when she started slipping out of the frame. In Green Wood, a man examines the death of his wife and the certainty of reality in a world where the TV program never changes. In The Char Paper Blues Band, a tiny group of professional musicians provides the background track to a couples life, from blissful harmony to the gradual souring of the song. Through magical realism and extended metaphor, Fleming explores the epiphenomena of failed relationships, the flotsam left behind in the wreckage of life as it was.

The economy has fallen, and flesh is worth more than dollars. Across four different districts of the City, a desperate banker must keep his employer happy at any cost, a boxer must choose between honor and the woman he loves, a criminal must atone for his past, and a man with a terrifying condition searches desperately for his missing daughter.Richard Thomas is the editor in chief of Dark House press.Caleb Ross is the author of five books of fiction.Axel Taiari is a French writer.Nik Korpon is the author of several books of fiction.

Set in a busted Massachusetts mill town circa 1986, The Castaway Lounge is the story of Jackson "e;Applejack"e; Thibedeaux. Cocaine dealer, womanizer, and tough-guy-for-hire, Applejack is weary of the wrong life and trying to leave it behind. But all bets are off when a young pole dancer ends up dead during an after-hours party with a local businessman and politician, and our hero risks going to prison or worse by setting in motion a plan to bring the killers to justice.Along the way, Applejack's fianceis abducted by a flying saucer and she goes on the Oprah Winfrey show to talk about her experience, a bible-thumping arsonist burns down the titty bar, and a disturbing love triangle forms when a washed-up guitar player seduces his teenage son's girlfriend. To further complicate matters, upon learning of her demise, the dead pole dancer's father and twin brother's thunder down from the high hills with violent intentions.It is a dark world that these people live in, but from time to time slivers of light manage to break through. At its core, the book is an exploration of one man's struggle to choose between right and wrong. And the fact that sometimes the right choice requires the ultimate sacrifice.Jon Boilard is the author of A River Closely Watched, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Born and raised in Western Massachusetts, Boilard lives in San Francisco, California.

The Sorrow Proper is a novel-length investigation of the anxiety that accompanies change. A group of aging librarians must decide whether to fight or flee from the end of print and the rise of electronic publications, while the parents of the young girl who died in front of the library struggle with their role in her loss. Anchored by the transposed stories of a photographer and his deaf mathematician lover each mourning the other's death, The Sorrow Proper attempts to illustrate how humans of all relationslovers, parents, colleaguescope with and challenge social "e;progress,"e; a mechanism that requires we ignore, and ultimately forget, the residual in order to make room for the new, to tell a story that resists "e;The End."e;This debut novel explores the hypothetical end of the public library system and a young theory in the hard sciences called Many Worlds, a branch of quantum mechanics that strives to prove mathematically that our lives do not follow a singular, linear path.Lindsey Drager's prose has appeared most recently in Web Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, West Branch Wired, Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. A Michigan native, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver where she edits the Denver Quarterly.

From ghosts to pink dolphins to a fight club of young women who practice beneath Alaska's aurora borealis, By Light We Knew Our Names examines the beauty and heartbreak of the world we live in. Across thirteen stories, this collection explores the thin border between magic and grief.

A thief steals the air from a room. Children invent a nursery rhyme to make sense of their fate, and a band of girls rots from the outside in. These characters stumble through joy and murder and confusion, only to survive and wait for the next catastrophe to arrive. Moments so brief and disturbing you can't afford to look away. Jac Jamc's affecting stories mine the territory between what is real and what it means to create understanding.

A collection of narrative essays on family, history, and travel from Croation American Josip Novakovich, a Whiting Writers' Award winner and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Having fled his homeland of Yugoslavia, leaving behind kin and community, the author here captures significant portraits of what is lost, what is remembered, and what remains. Within those moments of fresh clarity of the past are the instances of repeated culture shock that never seem to lose their harsh edges.

Pacazo is the story of John Segovia, an American historian who built himself a life in Piura, a small city on the desert coast of Peru where the real and the surreal intermix. Then both that life and the city were destroyed. John's wife was murdered, and his search for the killer takes place amidst the storms of El Nio.

';Markus has a remarkable ability to strip life down to its basics, to the point where the metaphors we manufacture as the looking-glass for our existence end up standing in for existence itself. Fish, mud, night and river come to stand in place of family connections as fathers and sons, by giving themselves to fishing give themselves over to a lone search and to loss.'Brian Evenson, author of The Open CurtainPeter Markus has published three story collections and lives in Michigan.

';In haunting, evocative prose, Roy Kesey captures the horrors of war, the insanity of genocide, as well as the fleeting joys of love. Nothing in the World is a memorable debut.'Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous PursuitsNothing in the World is sparingly written, yet with great detail and emotion.

My dog Tapeworm Johnson needed legitimate veterinary attention. It had been two years since she received annual shots. I read somewhere that an older dog can overdose on all these vaccinations, and I have foundI share this information with every dog owner I meetthat if you keep your pet away from rabid foxes, raccoons, skunks, bats, and people whose eyes rotate crazy in their sockets, then the chances of your own dog foaming at the mouth diminishes drastically. I also believe that dogs don't need microchips imbedded beneath their shoulder blades if you keep the dog leashed or in the house, or with the truck windows rolled up when you drive around showing the dog farm animals living in pastures. I brought this up to Dr. Page one time, back four years earlier when Tapeworm Johnson was somewhere between eight and nine. Tapeworm showed up at my door one morning, her ribs as visible as anything you'd order down at Clem and Lyda's Barbecue Shack off Scenic Highway 11, her paw pads split open from, I assumed, days traveling from wherever her conscienceless owner dropped her off. Eleven stories, all previously published in journals like The Atlantic, The Oxford American, and The Georgia Review, in which George Singleton brings small-town South Carolina alive. Using everyday situations like a dog needing its annual vaccination and buckets of humorous observations, Singleton pokes and prods his readers into realizing we're all simply restless for a pat on the head.

Like the Puritan-era narratives she studies, Hannah Guttentags early-1990s narrative is a chronicle of the strange places she travelsNashville, Ithaca, New Orleans, Cleveland, Nebraskathe savages who captivate herlibrarians, grad students, professors, her babyand the redemption she earns.Josh Russell's previous novels are Yellow Jack and My Bright Midnight. An Illinois nativeborn in Carbondale, raised in Normalhe now lives in Decatur, Georgia with his wife and daughter.