Cosmogony
Stories
List Price: $16.95
Paperback | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4, 256 pages | ISBN 9781593765996
An energetic, witty collection of stories where the supernatural meets the anomalies of everyday life–deception, infidelity, lost cats, cute memes, amateur pornography, and more.
There are analogies between being female and being left-handed, I think, or being an animal.
A woman answers a Craigslist ad (to write erotic diaries for money). A woman walks onto a tennis court (from her home at the bottom of the ocean). A woman goes to the supermarket and meets a friend’s husband (who happens to be an immortal demon). A woman goes for a run (and accidentally time travels).
Cosmogony takes accounts of so-called normal life and mines them for inconsistencies, deceptions, and delights. Incorporating a virtuosic range of styles and genres (Wikipedia entry, phone call, physics equation, encounters with the supernatural), these stories reveal how the narratives we tell ourselves and believe are inevitably constructed, offering a glimpse of the structures that underlie and apparently determine human existence.
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A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of Next Year
“A series of impossibly clever riffs on familiar features of modern life . . . from a mind that just won’t stop.” ––Kirkus Reviews
"Inventive . . . Structurally ingenious . . . Through juxtaposition and collage, these stories illuminate the trickier fringes of life right now." —Publishers Weekly
"Rare and fearless, Cosmogony's high-wire formal playfulness forges a circuit of human connection blinking at unlikely nodes. Even in moments of alienation and hurt, Ives's characters find themselves inextricably tethered to each other through philosophy, systems that fail them, art and love and searching. The puzzle pieces of this collection notch together, assembling a picture of the mysterious intelligence of coincidence and the sad, funny faces with which we meet it." —Tracy O'Neill, author of Quotients and The Hopeful
"I recommend Lucy Ives’s inventive collection of complex, deadpan, analytical, interrelated, controlledly wandering stories about divorce, lies, fear, parents, memes, the internet, art, artists, information, and literature." —Tao Lin, author of Trip and Taipei
Praise for Lucy Ives and Loudermilk:
"This clever satire of writing programs exhibits, with persuasive bitterness, the damage wreaked by the idea that literature is competition." --The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
"Hilarious . . . A riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend." --The Washington Post
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