Serial rights targeting Harper’s, The Atlantic, Paris Review, GrantaPrint and digital publicity targeting the New Yorker, Paris Review, NPR, New York Times, Bookforum, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, LARB, Literary HubCampaign emphasizing Dalkey Archive Essentials seriesNew introduction from recognized author/criticMarketing highlighting author’s past praiseTargeted bookseller mailingVirtual and in-person events featuring authorPromotion on publisher’s website and social media; promotion via e-newsletters to booksellers, reviewers
An ecological parable set on a Caribbean island in the 17th Century. The hero is a clubfooted individual by the name of Phosphor who invents a prototype of the camera to record the island's beauty. The project is financed by an unscrupulous patron who intends to exploit it for very non-ecological purposes. By the author of The Jade Cabinet.
Paperback
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
Serial rights targeting Harper’s, The Atlantic, Paris Review, GrantaPrint and digital publicity targeting the New Yorker, Paris Review, NPR, New York Times, Bookforum, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, LARB, Literary HubCampaign emphasizing Dalkey Archive Essentials seriesNew introduction from recognized author/criticMarketing highlighting author’s past praiseTargeted bookseller mailingVirtual and in-person events featuring authorPromotion on publisher’s website and social media; promotion via e-newsletters to booksellers, reviewers
An ecological parable set on a Caribbean island in the 17th Century. The hero is a clubfooted individual by the name of Phosphor who invents a prototype of the camera to record the island's beauty. The project is financed by an unscrupulous patron who intends to exploit it for very non-ecological purposes. By the author of The Jade Cabinet.
Description
Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet's dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island's seventeenth-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island's exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza. The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet's novel that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was described by one reviewer as "Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll." Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.
Critic Reviews
“"Rikki Ducornet's new novel is a delicious, spellbinding masterpiece. The exercise of her extravagant imaginative powers is rigorous, the richness of her writing concentrated to trenchant effect, and her enchanting narrative conducted with great intensity and seriousness. Phosphor's bewildering, bewildered career deserves a constellation in the firmament of literary heroes."--Harry Mathews "Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life's harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound." --Joanna Scott "Rikki Ducornet is imagination's emissary to this mundane world." --Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books "Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope." --The New York Times "Linguistically explosive. . . . One of the most interesting American writers around." --The Nation”
“Rikki Ducornet’s new novel is a delicious, spellbinding masterpiece. The exercise of her extravagant imaginative powers is rigorous, the richness of her writing concentrated to trenchant effect, and her enchanting narrative conducted with great intensity and seriousness. Phosphor’s bewildering, bewildered career deserves a constellation in the firmament of literary heroes.”—Harry Mathews
“Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.” —Joanna Scott
“Rikki Ducornet is imagination's emissary to this mundane world.” —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope.” —The New York Times
“Linguistically explosive. . . . One of the most interesting American writers around.” —The Nation
About the Author
Rikki Ducornet is a transdisciplinary artist. Her work is animated by an interest in nature, Eros, tyranny and the transcendent capacities of the creative imagination. She is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and artist, and her fiction has been translated into fifteen languages. Her art has been exhibited internationally, most recently with Amnesty International's traveling exhibitI Welcome,focused on the refugee crisis. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard College Arts and Letters Award, the Prix Guerlain, a Critics' Choice Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Her novelThe Jade Cabinetwas a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet's dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland , explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island's seventeenth-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island's exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza. The Jade Cabinet , Ducornet's novel that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was described by one reviewer as "Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll." Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.
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