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Skin Elegies
Skin Elegies uses the metaphor of mind-upload technologies to explore questions about the relationship of the cellular brain to personhood, memory, and where the human might end and something else begin.
In a dystiopian future, an American couple flee their increasingly authoritarian country 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 intersecting with memorable moments in human time: 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.
In a dystiopian future, an American couple flee their increasingly authoritarian country 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 intersecting with memorable moments in human time: 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.
248 pages, Paperback
Published November 9, 2021
1 person is currently reading
201 people want to read
About the author
Lance Olsen
55 books118 followersLance 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 21, 2021
"'What do you
do with all these tenses,
these continuous
misplacements in time?'
What Lance Olsen does is make a mosaic of temporal mourning."
The full review is now available for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/11/2...
I interviewed Lance earlier this year, which you can read here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/05/0...
do with all these tenses,
these continuous
misplacements in time?'
What Lance Olsen does is make a mosaic of temporal mourning."
The full review is now available for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/11/2...
I interviewed Lance earlier this year, which you can read here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/05/0...
May 19, 2025
A truly sensational novel from America’s most committed purveyor of formal innovation. A cycle of nine “narraticules” retelling tragic tales each in diverse, fascinating ways, Skin Elegies is a mesmerising work of wrenching proportions—as each story slowly works towards its inevitable quietus, the tension and dread simply scorches from the page, with Olsen’s shapeshifting and lyrical prose some of his career-defining best. As an exploration of our collective failures and tragedies, and a frightening look at our upcoming collective failures and tragedies, this novel offers up a deeply moving and endlessly inventive vision of a doomed species recycling its pain ad nauseam.
January 2, 2025
"This is how the present worked:
we are features of tales
we will never be features of."
- 11 :::: march :::: 2011
"What was hardest to accept was next morning the clocks kept collecting the minutes inside them just like usual."
- 10 :::: june :::: 2015
"When you are inside a tale like that, it never feels like you are in a tale like that."
- 29 :::: october :::: 1969
"Who ever imagined tourniquets could feel like tenderness?"
- 20::::april :::: 1999
"Memory is the mother of grief."
- 2 :::: may :::: 1945
"...it hitting you what a curious condition thinking was, exactly like waking up one day with a French accent."
- 8 :::: december :::: 1980
"The Me of Us can sense The Was has entered the God Swirl."
- 8 :::: august :::: 1974
'It is just the no no-light strewn with diamond-dust stars suspended in the middle of his reeling mind like an always."
- 28 :::: january :::: 1986
"wading farther and farther into
the warm dark sea."
- 11 :::: september :::: 2001
+++++++
"Living forever is tantamount to being trapped inside one's freedom."
- 29 :::: october :::: 2072 :::: 10:30 a.m.
+++++++
+++++++
I read this book twice over two years. Bits and pieces never dissolved. Bits and pieces will never be solved. Goddam I loved this book. I'm not usually a BIG fan of experimental fiction or art. I get the need for it, but often something gets lost; the humanity, emotions. But those writers and artists who can push the envelope without losing the thread of humanity are just amazing. This novel is a thread of 9, well, 10 different narratives. Broken. Fractured. Dislocating. Blending. I can't explain fully, but Olsen (who is an absolute mensch btw) manages to maintain the tension and the stories and land them in unexpected ways. I'm sad. But sad in a way something only beautiful, risky, and human can be sad. I don't want to say more. Saying more might give the game away, but if you've never read Olsen give this book a chance, or two.
Also.
Try another of his more recent novels: My Red Heaven. It is also amazing. Similar and different than this one. Equally built like a Kaleidoscope. Working with small packets, threads, strings wrapped un in various streams of consciousness to produce a picture of a place (My Red Heaven) or a mirror on life, death, and time (Skin Elegies).
Good luck.
we are features of tales
we will never be features of."
- 11 :::: march :::: 2011
"What was hardest to accept was next morning the clocks kept collecting the minutes inside them just like usual."
- 10 :::: june :::: 2015
"When you are inside a tale like that, it never feels like you are in a tale like that."
- 29 :::: october :::: 1969
"Who ever imagined tourniquets could feel like tenderness?"
- 20::::april :::: 1999
"Memory is the mother of grief."
- 2 :::: may :::: 1945
"...it hitting you what a curious condition thinking was, exactly like waking up one day with a French accent."
- 8 :::: december :::: 1980
"The Me of Us can sense The Was has entered the God Swirl."
- 8 :::: august :::: 1974
'It is just the no no-light strewn with diamond-dust stars suspended in the middle of his reeling mind like an always."
- 28 :::: january :::: 1986
"wading farther and farther into
the warm dark sea."
- 11 :::: september :::: 2001
+++++++
"Living forever is tantamount to being trapped inside one's freedom."
- 29 :::: october :::: 2072 :::: 10:30 a.m.
+++++++
+++++++
I read this book twice over two years. Bits and pieces never dissolved. Bits and pieces will never be solved. Goddam I loved this book. I'm not usually a BIG fan of experimental fiction or art. I get the need for it, but often something gets lost; the humanity, emotions. But those writers and artists who can push the envelope without losing the thread of humanity are just amazing. This novel is a thread of 9, well, 10 different narratives. Broken. Fractured. Dislocating. Blending. I can't explain fully, but Olsen (who is an absolute mensch btw) manages to maintain the tension and the stories and land them in unexpected ways. I'm sad. But sad in a way something only beautiful, risky, and human can be sad. I don't want to say more. Saying more might give the game away, but if you've never read Olsen give this book a chance, or two.
Also.
Try another of his more recent novels: My Red Heaven. It is also amazing. Similar and different than this one. Equally built like a Kaleidoscope. Working with small packets, threads, strings wrapped un in various streams of consciousness to produce a picture of a place (My Red Heaven) or a mirror on life, death, and time (Skin Elegies).
Good luck.
Read
November 3, 2022Don’t cheat and start at page 227. Try not to anyway. Maybe it would be easier to engage with the project.
Truth told, I had a bit of trouble engaging with the project the first time through, but this is a work that invites an immediate re-read.
“Why can’t I touch her hand?”
When you get to the central conceit of the book, transhumanism, the Bostrom computer simulation indistinguishability, you might have the reaction: who cares? And I admit, I understand the sterility of the intellectualism here.
But the rest of the book is about touch. An enjoyable experiment.
Truth told, I had a bit of trouble engaging with the project the first time through, but this is a work that invites an immediate re-read.
“Why can’t I touch her hand?”
When you get to the central conceit of the book, transhumanism, the Bostrom computer simulation indistinguishability, you might have the reaction: who cares? And I admit, I understand the sterility of the intellectualism here.
But the rest of the book is about touch. An enjoyable experiment.
February 20, 2024
As usual Lance Olsen is masterful at handling polyphonic narratives. However I'm not sure if I fully understood the final section which felt a bit like an after thought. I guess it's all about human connections, although all of the mini narratives concern people in extreme circumstances and not always connecting for the best. In fact mostly for the worse
January 5, 2026
Last summer, my aunt in Basel, Switzerland sat me down to tell me about her eventual plan for assisted suicide, a process offered legally through the Swiss government. She has no children, and I am the far-flung niece in Colorado to whom she feels closest — perhaps because we share a love of literature and anthropology. She outlined Switzerland’s protocols with calm precision.
Not to my surprise, I found myself longing for this possibility for myself in some distant way. As I watch elderly loved ones begin to circle the drain, I have wanted to circle it with them. I have always been scrappy and single-minded in my hunger for autonomy for myself and others. I pray to no god of authority, not even when that god is the passage of time.
The Skin Elegies has strengthened something in me. I don’t know if “more relaxed” is quite right. What I know is this: I feel more tolerant of my own (and everyone else’s) eventual death. Something I’ve been begging to grow within myself, trying desperately to summon.
There are moments of poignance and tenderness that define animal and human existence that I can only bear to see in my peripheral vision. If I were to look at them straight on, I would be crushed. Beauty lives in the fact that we are fragile and that we will die. This book asks you to look straight on — unflinchingly — for the entirety of its delightfully fragmented narratives.
The stories fracture and reassemble organically.
Each narrative moves us toward the same precipice, the same intimate encounter with the void:
- a young Syrian refugee attempting to pay a smuggler in order to avoid being bombed to death.
- an elderly woman in Switzerland contemplating assisted suicide.
- the astronauts aboard the Challenger in their final moments (a thread that recalled for me the song The Commander Thinks Aloud by The Long Winters).
- a partially conscious witness to the Columbine shooting.
- a teenage girl navigating her parents’ divorce alongside the gravity of their mental illnesses.
- a schoolteacher scrambling for survival as a tsunami approaches.
- a podcast interview with one of the two men who invented the internet.
- a Nazi and his lover in hiding as Soviet troops close in
- a man contemplating the assassination of John Lennon
- a quantum computational neuroscientist presenting on the ethics of a human mind that could live forever
Who am I forgetting? (I wrote this only by memory and didn’t look things up because I am both stubborn and a bit lazy)
Across these fragments, Olsen composes not a catalog of deaths, but a meditation on what it means to live in full awareness of death — to remain porous, trembling, open.
May I remain porous, trembling, open. Ugh. Ugh!!!!!!! Just like Ry sitting in the evolutionary biology lecture (am I remembering this correctly?), I am delighted and energized by this somehow. Let me notice the streaks of sepia as my aircraft careens into the endless blue ocean.
Not to my surprise, I found myself longing for this possibility for myself in some distant way. As I watch elderly loved ones begin to circle the drain, I have wanted to circle it with them. I have always been scrappy and single-minded in my hunger for autonomy for myself and others. I pray to no god of authority, not even when that god is the passage of time.
The Skin Elegies has strengthened something in me. I don’t know if “more relaxed” is quite right. What I know is this: I feel more tolerant of my own (and everyone else’s) eventual death. Something I’ve been begging to grow within myself, trying desperately to summon.
There are moments of poignance and tenderness that define animal and human existence that I can only bear to see in my peripheral vision. If I were to look at them straight on, I would be crushed. Beauty lives in the fact that we are fragile and that we will die. This book asks you to look straight on — unflinchingly — for the entirety of its delightfully fragmented narratives.
The stories fracture and reassemble organically.
Each narrative moves us toward the same precipice, the same intimate encounter with the void:
- a young Syrian refugee attempting to pay a smuggler in order to avoid being bombed to death.
- an elderly woman in Switzerland contemplating assisted suicide.
- the astronauts aboard the Challenger in their final moments (a thread that recalled for me the song The Commander Thinks Aloud by The Long Winters).
- a partially conscious witness to the Columbine shooting.
- a teenage girl navigating her parents’ divorce alongside the gravity of their mental illnesses.
- a schoolteacher scrambling for survival as a tsunami approaches.
- a podcast interview with one of the two men who invented the internet.
- a Nazi and his lover in hiding as Soviet troops close in
- a man contemplating the assassination of John Lennon
- a quantum computational neuroscientist presenting on the ethics of a human mind that could live forever
Who am I forgetting? (I wrote this only by memory and didn’t look things up because I am both stubborn and a bit lazy)
Across these fragments, Olsen composes not a catalog of deaths, but a meditation on what it means to live in full awareness of death — to remain porous, trembling, open.
May I remain porous, trembling, open. Ugh. Ugh!!!!!!! Just like Ry sitting in the evolutionary biology lecture (am I remembering this correctly?), I am delighted and energized by this somehow. Let me notice the streaks of sepia as my aircraft careens into the endless blue ocean.
May 21, 2024
I was a little hesitant when I started this book, but still curious. I immediately felt unmoored in the staccato prose and thrust into a handful of storylines for a bunch of dates...some of which I knew as they related to history; others I had to look up. I'm glad I continued because what comes together is a resonant piece of literature that explores some important events in human history, and what may come next. I should say, what is explored is the human interaction, how we relate, how we witness, how we endure humanity. The final event, set in the future, nearly made me weep while I finished it it in a cold courtroom awaiting to be called for jury selection.
I didn't know stories are
the events that only happen
to other people.
When they happen to you,
they're called the world.
Probably going to be one of the best and memorable books I read this year.
I didn't know stories are
the events that only happen
to other people.
When they happen to you,
they're called the world.
Probably going to be one of the best and memorable books I read this year.
February 14, 2023
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. For Josiah Richardson, this philosophical belief becomes gorgeously, painfully evident. Even as his mind is uploaded to a supercomputer, disparate voices continue to haunt him: John Lennon’s assassin converses with Jesus; Dave Sanders—the Columbine High School teacher who gives his life protecting students—feels the tenderness of tourniquets, the presence of abiding love, as he becomes we and individual students blur into us: “All any of us wants to do, wanted to do, will ever want to do is thank them, that handswarm, for their touch, their frantic mouth output through cell phones to the dispatchers who promise the police are on their way, will be with us in fewer than ten minutes.” Seduced by her father to deceive her sister and collaborate in her mother’s brutal murder, a young woman describes herself only as “the Me of Us.” Every day of her life was and is “heaven on earth. Only the opposite.”
Stories are dispersed, displaced, fused, fractured: surprising juxtapositions expose a marvelously unique neural network, the thrilling leaps of thought through one man’s empathic imagination. Who besides Josiah Richardson has witnessed the last visions of Challenger astronaut and grade school teacher Christa McAuliffe as her students’ skins begin to smoke: “One by one, they shiver into shafts of flame.” Who else has heard a Syrian Refugee ask his son: “How were we born into this? What did we do that was so terrible?” He tells the child: “Nobody will ever again have a place to call here. Maybe someday nobody will be welcome anywhere they travel and everybody will have to keep moving from one country to another, unwanted by everybody they meet.”
Josiah lives in such a world. He is a refugee in extremis, a man willing to annihilate his physical self to escape the environmental decimation of the Great Catastrophe and the tyranny of the Reformation Government in the former United States. With the Me of Us, he shares “the holocaust in our brainpans.” Like astronaut Dick Scobee, he “wills himself present for the astounding sensations to come.”
Readers who dare to enter this troubling text risk feeling not only their minds, but their hearts exploding. Through a cascade of catastrophes, we know the expansiveness and intimacy of grief are ever and without end. The exhilarating languages Lance Olsen deploys in Skin Elegies disturb and wound, shock and awaken us. Through wildly divergent constellations of experience, he helps us begin to understand what might be possible, what we might know, if we dared a loving intervention, insight based on ardent curiosity, revelation rising from the most merciful depths of exploratory extrapolation and contemplation.
The upload of Josiah’s mind stutters and fails. As soon as he imagines his wife Elisha, he longs for the consolation of touch. Scoured out of his own body, he has no way of understanding loss beyond language, the infinitely mysterious, incomparable ways we know and love one another through somatic sensations. The galaxy of the mind is vast—but without skin, without bodies, there can be no full consciousness as we in human form experience the complexities of our many selves.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the flashes of thought arriving in the voice of a survivor of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that catalyzed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Himari composes the most harrowing story imaginable on a cell phone, evoking the devastation of losing her aging parents in short bursts of text, reducing immense personal and global damage to a tiny screen. As she writes, she feels the shuddering earth and roiling flood, her mother’s and father’s hands slipping from her own hands. With Himari, we share the sorrow of the world “ending over and over again.” Telling this story offers no solace: “Think of me as remembering out loud for a little while in the palm of your hand.” The many hands holding cell phones, the hundreds of people reading this short testimony, do not touch, cannot see her. Her confession, briefly uploaded into others’ minds, will be deleted, mostly forgotten by the time readers sink into sleep.
Lance Olsen describes his never ending work in the world this way: “I’ve started a list of events I can’t conceive, and yet have to conceive to try and fail to understand what it means to be a human being.”
If we all started these lists, if we all embarked on journeys as ravishing as the ones in Skin Elegies, we too might move ever closer to the rapture and release of becoming more humane, more fully human. We might enter the tentative peace of a Demilitarized Zone where all who seem terrifying or strange, all we have considered unworthy of love and attention, become familiar, become family: brothers, sisters, selves known through endless incarnations.
Lance Olsen’s spectacularly innovative novel is a song of exultation for the limitlessness of our minds—and a lament for limits of our bodies.
Stories are dispersed, displaced, fused, fractured: surprising juxtapositions expose a marvelously unique neural network, the thrilling leaps of thought through one man’s empathic imagination. Who besides Josiah Richardson has witnessed the last visions of Challenger astronaut and grade school teacher Christa McAuliffe as her students’ skins begin to smoke: “One by one, they shiver into shafts of flame.” Who else has heard a Syrian Refugee ask his son: “How were we born into this? What did we do that was so terrible?” He tells the child: “Nobody will ever again have a place to call here. Maybe someday nobody will be welcome anywhere they travel and everybody will have to keep moving from one country to another, unwanted by everybody they meet.”
Josiah lives in such a world. He is a refugee in extremis, a man willing to annihilate his physical self to escape the environmental decimation of the Great Catastrophe and the tyranny of the Reformation Government in the former United States. With the Me of Us, he shares “the holocaust in our brainpans.” Like astronaut Dick Scobee, he “wills himself present for the astounding sensations to come.”
Readers who dare to enter this troubling text risk feeling not only their minds, but their hearts exploding. Through a cascade of catastrophes, we know the expansiveness and intimacy of grief are ever and without end. The exhilarating languages Lance Olsen deploys in Skin Elegies disturb and wound, shock and awaken us. Through wildly divergent constellations of experience, he helps us begin to understand what might be possible, what we might know, if we dared a loving intervention, insight based on ardent curiosity, revelation rising from the most merciful depths of exploratory extrapolation and contemplation.
The upload of Josiah’s mind stutters and fails. As soon as he imagines his wife Elisha, he longs for the consolation of touch. Scoured out of his own body, he has no way of understanding loss beyond language, the infinitely mysterious, incomparable ways we know and love one another through somatic sensations. The galaxy of the mind is vast—but without skin, without bodies, there can be no full consciousness as we in human form experience the complexities of our many selves.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the flashes of thought arriving in the voice of a survivor of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that catalyzed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Himari composes the most harrowing story imaginable on a cell phone, evoking the devastation of losing her aging parents in short bursts of text, reducing immense personal and global damage to a tiny screen. As she writes, she feels the shuddering earth and roiling flood, her mother’s and father’s hands slipping from her own hands. With Himari, we share the sorrow of the world “ending over and over again.” Telling this story offers no solace: “Think of me as remembering out loud for a little while in the palm of your hand.” The many hands holding cell phones, the hundreds of people reading this short testimony, do not touch, cannot see her. Her confession, briefly uploaded into others’ minds, will be deleted, mostly forgotten by the time readers sink into sleep.
Lance Olsen describes his never ending work in the world this way: “I’ve started a list of events I can’t conceive, and yet have to conceive to try and fail to understand what it means to be a human being.”
If we all started these lists, if we all embarked on journeys as ravishing as the ones in Skin Elegies, we too might move ever closer to the rapture and release of becoming more humane, more fully human. We might enter the tentative peace of a Demilitarized Zone where all who seem terrifying or strange, all we have considered unworthy of love and attention, become familiar, become family: brothers, sisters, selves known through endless incarnations.
Lance Olsen’s spectacularly innovative novel is a song of exultation for the limitlessness of our minds—and a lament for limits of our bodies.
June 30, 2025
This book left me unable to read anything else for several days, and I normally jump right into the next one off the shelf. The nine devastating stories woven into the synaptic asterism of Skin Elegies have that rare ability to refresh familiar historical events and remind us of the universality of these kinds of tragedies. It's especially effective in the use of the plural first person in the Columbine thread:
"... our legs have already become running. Our legs-become-running are joined by the running legs of two janitors, Rich and Rob. We stop long enough to watch our hand - Dave's hand - pull the fire alarm. We stop long enough to listen to our mouth fill with sound objects. The sound objects direct the students in various stages of metabolism - a hundred, a hundred fifty - to sprint toward life because-"
The language and typography are befitting of a former chair of FC2, and this is the type of writer who has the likes of Mark Danielewski soiling their tryhard, fanboy dungarees in wonder. I can't speak highly enough of my first Lance Olsen. More on the way in the mail because my state has yet to erect a real bookstore.
"... our legs have already become running. Our legs-become-running are joined by the running legs of two janitors, Rich and Rob. We stop long enough to watch our hand - Dave's hand - pull the fire alarm. We stop long enough to listen to our mouth fill with sound objects. The sound objects direct the students in various stages of metabolism - a hundred, a hundred fifty - to sprint toward life because-"
The language and typography are befitting of a former chair of FC2, and this is the type of writer who has the likes of Mark Danielewski soiling their tryhard, fanboy dungarees in wonder. I can't speak highly enough of my first Lance Olsen. More on the way in the mail because my state has yet to erect a real bookstore.
October 13, 2025
sometimes you forgive people simply
because you still need them in your life
because you still need them in your life
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews