Böcker av Lance Olsen

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 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 entropology, creative disjunction, autrebiography, media culture, and identity politics, with insights into the lives and writings of fellow stylists like Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Donald Barthelme, Steve Tomasula, Kathy Acker, and many others. All this is supplemented by reflections on his own craft and worldly experiences. Intuitive, edifying, and earnest, Shrapnel reveals Olsen's breadth of knowledge while (re)establishing him as one of the few living authors invested in preserving the increasingly lost art of literature.

With Lance Olsen's signature flair, Absolute Away is an innovative narrative triptych, a story of one life reimagined. The first movement tells the story of Edie Metzger, a little Jewish girl who bit Hermann Göring's lip so hard it bled at a Nazi book-burning rally in 1933. In the second, in 1956, grown Edie is the passenger clinging to the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, moments before it plunges off the road. In the third, the narrative embarks into an ever-unspooling universe of Edies that might have lived-Edie's gender, past, and consciousness flying forever farther apart. Absolute Away is a novel about travel in its largest sense-about the self, the past, the future, aging, ideas, relationships, our own mortal being(s) as transitive verbs, and how what and who we are connects to everything else.

"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.

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

Lance Olsen's discerning critique was the first extended study ever published on the work of William Gibson, whose mindbending science fiction novel, Neuromancer (1984), created the subgenre of Cyberpunk, and became the first novel to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards for best SF novel of the year. Olsen covers Gibson's major early works, including Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Complete with bibliography, notes, and index.

This fascinating study of literary theory is the first work of its kind to examine the intersection of fantasy and postmodernism, and to analyze contemporary fantasy writers comparatively. After carefully developing working definitions of postmodernism and fantasy, the author goes on to analyze works by various postmodernist fantasy writers.