Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Calendar of Regrets - Lance Olsen (FC2)

Calendar of Regrets is 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.

It is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.

"Lance Olsen misbehaves in all sorts of grave and playful ways. He throws Hieronymus Bosch in the mix with Agamemnon; God in the mix with the devil. Here are postcards, podcasts, and fairy tales; terrorism and angels; aphasia and aneurysym; bludgeonings and vacuous friendships. Calendar of Regrets is a spectacular synthesis, a wild ride through a free mind. I have never read anything like it." — Noy Holland, author of What Begins with Bird

Lance Olsen's short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading. Olsen is an N.E.A. Fellowship and Pushcart Prize recipient, a Fulbright Scholar, 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, and Finnish. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; Associate Editor at The American Book Review; and Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. Published escerpts of the Calendar of Regrets are online at: Perigree + ServingHouse + Brooklyn Rail.

FC2: Fiction Collective Two
Fiction Collective Two is an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction. FC2 is supported in part by the University of Utah, the University of Houston - Victoria, the University of Alabama Press, and private contributors.

Lance Olsen: Calendar of Regrets
a collage of 12 interconnected narratives
456 pages, $22.00
ISBN 978-1-57366-157-7

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