Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
The author of nine novels as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poems, Rikki Ducornet has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, honored twice by the Lannan Foundation, and the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Widely published abroad, Ducornet is also a painter who exhibits internationally. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.<b>Praise for <i>The Plotinus</i></b><br /><br />“Dashingly absurd. . . . Ducornet’s latest is replete with figures that represent mankind in all its vainglorious hubris to great comedic effect while echoing the familiar sorrow of humanity’s severance from, and ultimate destruction of, the natural world that gives us both our meaning and our memories. It is a surreal novel that, nonetheless, feels disconcertingly real. . . . An inscrutable wonder of a book that rewards a reader’s attention with its own returned gaze.” <b>—<i>Kirkus,</i></b> <b>starred review</b><br /><br />“When all the beauty left in a denuded world is concentrated in the delicate body of a visiting hornet, what else is there for a narrator (or for us) to do but love her. So <i>The Plotinus</i> shows us. This book is elegant, hilarious, ominous, and transcendent.” <b>—Rae Armantrout</b><br /><br />“So new, so strange. . . . It enthralled me.” <b>—Forrest Gander</b>
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.