Shrapnel: Contemplations

by 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. CONTEMPLATIONS 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

305 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 2, 2024

About the author

Lance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.

He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.

Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.

Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.

He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.

Reviews

[George]

Thank you to Antioedipus Press for sending a review copy to me. I’ve enjoyed several of Lance’s novels thus far and this book of nonfiction acts as a skeleton key to his work and ethos. It also features wonderful reflections and analyses of other authors, including Borges, Robert Coover, David Foster Wallace, and Kathy Acker, among others.

Even if you haven’t read Lance’s work yet, I’d recommend Shrapnel to anyone interested in where the novel as an art form has been and where it could go. There’s also a somber and profound and disturbing meditation on mortality titled “Lessness,” which alone makes the book worth reading, but there are plenty of other literary gems in here. Thought-provoking and inspiring.

[David Agranoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admit Lance Olsen who has written many books was new to me. AOP and the works published by my Dickheads Co-host D.Harlan Wilson have for years been an automatic read. The many cover designs had me thinking this might be a horror or ultra-violent story collection but it instead it is a collection of essays of intense literary criticism, musings, and ideas. The last bit is interviews with the author.

This might sound like a backhanded compliment but this book is loaded with big words and highly academic language, I admit some of goes over my head. The essays tend to move effortlessly from commenting on reading and writing. The first six essays "Limit Situations" my favorite these essays was "Reading/Writing as Tangle."

"Nietzsche, Bataille, Deluze, and others are emblematic of the appreciation that exists in any meaningful way until the event of reading occurs, and that event is a form of writing and unwriting." When Olsen suggests without the right mind a piece of writing doesn't work as well. He does a lot to get into feelings I know well. Reading is different for writers. I enjoyed this essay.

The 2 section Autrebioprahies has a few great essays like Literary Autism and the wonderfully snooty title of "Ontological Metalepses & the Politics of the Page." Section 3 Speech Acts are interviews with Olsen or ones he was a part of.

This time of book of essays is one I might not have read if I had been gifted a copy but I am glad I did. It was a thought-provoking work. I had to slow down from time to time and think about passages. This is not a light read. What is important about what AOP is doing here is making these types of books available in paperback. Not ultra-expensive academic publishing editions that are cost-prohibitive to most readers. Two or three of the essays would be worth the volume alone but every single essay has value.