Skin Elegies by Lance Olsen

PRAISE FOR SKIN ELEGIES

"I can’t help but adore Olsen's willingness to rescue text from the screen and set it free on the page.”

—Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves

"This ambitious novel juxtaposes historical tragedies with a futuristic frame. ... while these storylines can be emotionally devastating on the page (particularly the Challenger subplot), the skill with which Olsen links them together keeps things moving at an impressive pace. Readers willing to immerse themselves in this challenging novel will be left with plenty to discuss afterward.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"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.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Nimble prose captures the book’s diverse moods and tones, from a famous murderer’s twisted inner ramblings to a Japanese math teacher’s minimalist, poetic observations about life as the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit. ... Skin Elegies is a most unusual and compelling novel about the diversity and necessity of human connection..”

—Foreword Reviews (starred)

"Cinching bands of filmic narrative tighten. You must keep reading Skin Elegies, but why? Suspense. Meanwhile, take in the novel’s rhythms, textual harmonics, and notion of human meaning lost/gained/lost in the multiverse—these also are its propellants. Its friable core is story. Lance Olsen's newest work is an amazing literary experiment."

—Stacey Levine, author of The Girl with Brown Fur, Frances Johnson, and My Horse and Other Stories

"The curiously soulful mosaic of Skin Elegies's stories of connections missed, broken, catastrophic, and impossible is a reminder that, for all that has been and will be made of Lance Olsen's architectonic innovations, his novels are never other than deeply humane and inspirited, not to mention pure pleasure for the adventurous reader. Skin Elegies is horrific, elegiac, far-seeing, and brilliant."

—Gabriel Blackwell, author of CORRECTION and Babel

ambitious and astonishing narrative bricolage as Lance Olsen's Skin Elegies. This meaty metanovel takes an esthetically and judiciously selected handful of our most vital history from 1945 to a prescient 2072, atomizes and digitizes it, then hits the SHUFFLE button before replaying the events through a set of hallucinogenic filters that Instagram would kill for. The effect is like riding a rollercoaster through a set of stargates, looping in an out of a multiverse composed of unforgettable characters and scintillant prose-poems. As fresh as the unfolding new decade, yet as eternal as the oneiric oracles of Tiresias, this book rebuilds our shared past and channels our mutual futures."

--Paul Di Filippo, author of Ribofunk, Cosmocopia, The Mezcal Crack-up, and others

"Reading Skin Elegies feels like watching your mind explode, translating and transfiguring infinite possibilities into a brilliant galaxy all around and piercingly inside you. Memories spark and intensify, each flare fueled by compassion, invention, despair, horror. We are not ourselves, alone. Lance Olsen’s spectacularly innovative novel is a song of exultation for the limitlessness of our minds—and a lament for the limits of our bodies."

—Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River and The 7th Man

“These continuous misplacements in time,” thinks one character here, “are like helium in your fist.” Imagine that, a balloon covered with human skin— imagine such a thing floating off, leaving those who’d known its tender flesh to sing an elegy. Visions like that erupt throughout this magnificent text, a 21st-Century metamorphoses, an Ovid come back to restore us to awe. The comparison might make other writers quail, but not Lance Olsen, the American most of the moment and farthest off the chain. Here he often works with figures from history, like the Challenger astronauts and the victims at Columbine, but even those who never made the headlines make bold and bruising new shapes of their stories. Skin Elegies shreds."

--John Domini, author of Movieola!

"To read Skin Elegies is to ping between verbal asterisms generated by de-selving selves, to become, in the process, de-selved yourself. What is a mind without the brain to house it? Lance Olsen has written an historiographic neuronovel of residues and traces, static and sparks. Skin Elegies is a love poem from the future and a countdown to the past. It's a new structure for thinking being, now.”

—Joanna Ruocco

"Skin Elegies is the novel that the 21st century has been waiting for. Brilliantly conceived and impossible to sum up because it radiates in so many directions, it poignantly articulates the always-ever-present of the Now, relating experiences as disparate in time and space as John Lennon's murder, the plastic smell inside an astronaut’s helmet, the consciousness of mountains. With the lyricism of poetry, its clouds of association conjure a theater of memory so profound and interconnected that we feel in our guts how the past, indeed, isn’t really past. Which is another way of saying, the future is already here; it just isn’t finished."

—Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland

“Lance Olsen’s literary experiments are a constant source of wonder. He has the rare ability to reinvent not only himself but the text on the page. His innovative, interrogative prose feels uniquely suited for the crisis of our time. Told through the metaphor of a mind upload technology that is almost certainly in our future, Skin Elegies simultaneously sets nine stories spiraling into each other, becoming the other, collapsing under their own weight and re-emerging as something new. Held together as much by the couple in the supercomputer and the nine other narrators as by the reader herself, Olsen boldly challenges us to recognize that our ability to create meaning in the present might just be what saves us.”

—Jarret Middleton, author of Darkansas

"In Skin Elegies, Lance Olsen takes the notion of the ghost in the machine to its superlative. Grappling with the human limits of and capacities for violence, grief, tragedy, and tenderness, Skin Elegies asks us to contemplate how the self is constructed and managed in and beyond the 21st century. A novel of kaleidoscopic horror—and Olsen at his most haunting."

—Lindsey Drager, The Archive of Alternative Endings

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lance Olsen is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels My Red Heaven (Dzanc, 2020) and Dreamlives of Debris (Dzanc, 2017). His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Village Voice, BOMB, McSweeney’s, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.