Lance Olsen

"A wildly inventive and visually rich collage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel-- through time, space, narrative, and death"--Publisher description.

Calendar of Regrets

Trevor Dodge

"Architectures of Possibility" theorizes and questions the often unconscious assumptions behind such traditional writing gestures as temporality, scene, and characterization; offers various suggestions for generating writing that resists, rethinks, and challenges authors to push their work into self-aware and surprising territory.

After Innovative Writing

Architectures of Possibility

Always Crashing in the Same Car

Anxious Pleasures takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surround Gregor Samsa during his plight. The hysterical mother, the stern father, the faithless sister, and their pragmatic cook all speak up here, while Olsen introduces new characters like the writer downstairs, day-dreaming the narrative he may someday compose, and a young woman in contemporary London reading Kafka's slim book for the first time. In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and John Gardner's Grendel, Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but also a celebration, augmentation, and complication of a momentously influential text.

A Novel After Kafka

Anxious Pleasures

A critifictional novel about a couple who create a make-believe daughter

Girl Imagined by Chance

Written during Olsen's five-month stay at the American Academy in Berlin, [[ there. ]] is part critifictional meditation and part trash diary exploring what happens at the confluence of curiosity, travel, and innovative writing practices. A collage of observations, facts, quotations, recollections, and theoretical reflections, it touches on a wide range of authors, genres, and places, from Beckett and Ben Marcus to David Bowie and Wayne Koestenbaum, film and architecture to avant-garde music and hypermedia, the Venezuelan jungle and Bhutanese mountains to New Jersey mall culture and the restlessness known as Berlin. [[ there. ]] is an always-already bracketed performance about how, by inhabiting unstable spaces, we continually unlearn and therefore relearn what thought, experience, and imagination feel like.

There

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

My Red Heaven

This book imagines what Nietzsche's last night on earth was like and the many things that must have gone through his mind in those last hours.

A Novel

Nietzsche's Kisses

Set in an AMC theater in the iconic Mall of America, 10:01 drops into and out of the various minds of the audience members during the few minutes before the feature rolls, sampling various filmic genres (horror, magical realism, SF, the love story, porn, and much more) as it speeds toward an apocalyptic conclusion called our society of the spectacle.

10:01

a novel after Kafka

Anxious pleasures

Much has been made over the potentially dark and dangerous side of postmodernism — its antihumanism, its attack on basic assumptions about language and experience, its denial of selfhood. For Lance Olsen, however, there are points of convergence between postmodernism and the comic vision. Both the comic and the postmodern attempt to subvert all centers of authority — including their own. Both ultimately deride univocal visions. Through radical incongruity of form and vision, both seek to short-circuit the dominant culture's repressive impulses. After a lively introductory chapter that maps the confluence of postmodernism and the comic vision, Olsen focuses on seven British and American fiction writers, using their works to examine various aspects of the rise and fall of postmodern humor in our culture.

Postmodernism and the Comic Vision

Circus of the Mind in Motion

A cutting-edge, heading-for-the-millennium guide to the craft of fiction writing. Rebel Yell is ideal for individual or classroom use.

Fast-paced and entertaining Rebel Yell, by acclaimed award-winning novelist Lance Olsen, begins with a concise but thorough presentation of compositional basics and quickly progresses to more sophisticated concerns, such as navigating the murky waters of the publishing industry, jump-starting your creative muse, and getting the most out of writing workshops. Whether you are sculpting a great hook, deciphering contract rights and wrongs, or coping with the challenges of a writer's life, hip and honest Rebel Yell can guide you to find your own best solutions.

Innovative writing exercises at the end of each chapter encourage writers of all abilities to stretch and flex their creative muscles, while supplemental reading lists guide those who want to push the power of their pens to the next level. Best of all, Rebel Yell features something entirely lacking in many texts: more than 40 interviews with contemporary authors, editors, and publishers (including Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Raymond Federman, and Larry McCaffery) working in diverse media, providing significant insights into the multifaceted worlds of "them that's doin' it." Witty and informative, Rebel Yell is the definitive guide to writing fiction that will grab attention in a crowded literary world.

A Short Guide to Fiction Writing

Rebel Yell

قبلات نيتشه

Dreamlives of Debris is a hybrid retelling of the Theseus and Minotaur myth. Here the Minotaur is a little deformed girl--she calls herself Debris--hidden away from public view in the labyrinth beneath Knossos. She possesses the ability to hear the flood of thoughts and see the flood of memories, desires, and futures of others throughout history from Herodotus and Pliny to Borges and Edward Snowden. Her labyrinth takes the form of an impossible liquid architecture bearing no center and hence no discernible perimeter.Dreamlives of Debris explores such impossible architecture as a way of knowing -- an extended metaphor for our current sense of lived experience: the feeling, for instance, of being awash in massive, networked data fields that may lead everywhere and nowhere at once. The lyrical narrative takes the form of a collage composed of multiple voices and genres from multiple time periods.

Dreamlives of Debris

Head in Flames is an astonishing collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, and quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font and aesthetic / political / existential space. The first belongs to Vincent van Gogh on the day he shot himself in Auverssur-Oise in July 1890. The second to Theo van Gogh (Vincent's brother's great grandson) on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004. The third to Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo's murderer, outraged by the filmmaker's collaboration with controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a 10-minute experimental short critiquing Muslim subjugation and abuse of women. The aggregate: a restless, haunting exploration of art's purpose, religion's increasingly dominant role as engine of politics and passion, the complexities of foreignness and assimilation, and the limits of tolerance.

Head in Flames

Theories of Forgetting is concerned with how words matter, the materiality of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in the digital age--right from its use of two back covers (one "upside down" and one "right-side up") that allow the reader to choose which of the novel's two narratives to privilege. Theories of Forgetting is a narrative in three parts. The first is the story of Alana, a filmmaker struggling to complete a short documentary about Robert Smithson’ s famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the Great Salt Lake meets the desert. Alana falls victim to a pandemic called The Frost, whose symptoms include an increasing sensation of coldness and growing amnesia. The second involves Alana’ s husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance across Jordan while on a trip both to remember and to forget Alana’ s death. The third involves marginalia added to Hugh’ s section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic living in Berlin. Aila discovers a manuscript by her father after his disappearance and tries to make sense of it by means of a one-sided “ dialogue” with her brother, Lance. Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’ s narrative runs across the top of the page, from back to front, while Hugh’ s and his daughter’ s tale runs “ upside down” across the bottom of the page, from front to back. How a reader initially happens to pick up Theories of Forgetting determines which narrative is read first, and thereby establishing the reader’ s meaning-making of the novel.

Theories of Forgetting

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.

William Gibson

Tells the story of the relationship between budding writer Bink, and art student Clare, through life, death, and beyond

Live from Earth

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.

Lance Olsen

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