Reviews
The combined effect of the different styles on display here is virtuosic, but Olsen never loses sight of the bigger scope of history-or the tragedies the future will hold for most of these characters. This novel manages the impressive task of being both experimental and accessible-and thoroughly moving to boot. -Kirkus Reviews Inspired by German artist Otto Freundlich's painting of the same title, this meditation on the effects of a specific moment in history and the human condition reaches past cultural barriers and time to create a narrative that pushes boundaries and reflects on what is means to dwell in the here and now. -Publishers Weekly The fleeting encounters of the famous and not-so-famous dead, in their own voices, sketch out a vanishing moment in a Berlin on the brink. Lance Olsen's My Red Heaven is a work of necromantic dazzlement. -Shelley Jackson, author of Riddance, Half Life, and The Melancholy of Anatomy Rarely is genuine innovation this heartfelt. Through erudition and capacious prose, Olsen achieves a kind of cultural autopsy of an inflamed space and time. The result is a privileged view of naked humanity, consoled by art, science, and the rest, but ultimately unable to escape its baseness. A powerful work. -Sergio de la Pava, author of Lost Empress and Personae Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what is it to be alive. -Carole Maso, author of Ava and The Art Lover In this twenty-four-hour novel, Olsen explores new subjectivities and new histories both after and before the moments directly written about. It's fascinating and wonderfully readable. Kafka, Nabokov, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all make their appearances...and strange lists of newsworthy events cascade down before us now and again. It's a fitting follow-up to Calendar of Regrets and beautifully written. -Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgrenand Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders The moment in which you awaken is on fire. You are alive or the other thing, falling to scorched earth or ascending to the rooftops of Berlin, a radiantly red heaven. You feel yourself besieged, swirling inside one startling sensibility and then another, deliriums of joy pierced by devastations of loss and sorrow. Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven, Otto Freundlich's abstract cubist painting, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint, turning his fiercely attentive, unbounded love to every being in every moment, exposing infinite unknown dimensions, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment. -Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River, Silence & Song Where to stand in this original novel as History that unspeakably painfully hurts while montaging all our astonishing, poignant, and gross ironies. Between lives, even our own, that are less here than nearby or elsewhere; between Dietrich and Heisenberg; between, on one hand (literally), Arendt and Heidegger showering and thinking about thinking, and deaths there perhaps are no words for; between what is actually, terribly being evoked and, dissolve after dissolve, an exquisite narrative prose risking again and again an incorrigible lightness. At random, I thought of Wittgenstein in Duffy's The World as I Found It; dictatorship in Spufford's Red Plenty; the sculptural work of Joseph Beuys; and, where fact seems all the more fact in a context of fictive documentation, the great Sebald. -Joseph McElroy, author of Women and Men and Cannonball My Red Heaven is interesting and difficult, ambitious, audacious and smart. Like a Teutonic James Joyce, Lance Olsen is pushing at boundaries. -John Haskell, author of Out of My Skin and The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts Olsen's My Red Heaven is a superb evocation of a specific time and place-Berlin, 10 June 1927-that captures the intellectual ferment, the descent into decadence, and rise of Nazism during the Weimar Republic. With historically precise detailing and grimly gorgeous imagery, Olsen portrays a number of notable people traversing the day, conveyed from a variety of points-of-view-even a dog's-and in a variety of 1920s forms: Joycean interior monologue, Dos Passosian newsreel, UFA film script, Benjaminian notes, and more. An intellectual and stylistic tour de force from one of America's most consistently innovative writers. -Steven Moore, author of The Novel, An Alternative History
Rarely is genuine innovation this heartfelt. Through erudition and capacious prose, Olsen achieves a kind of cultural autopsy of an inflamed space and time. The result is a privileged view of naked humanity, consoled by art, science, and the rest, but ultimately unable to escape its baseness. A powerful work. --Sergio de la Pava, author of Lost Empress and Personae Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what is it to be alive. -Carole Maso, author of Ava and The Art Lover In this twenty-four-hour novel, Olsen explores new subjectivities and new histories both after and before the moments directly written about. It's fascinating and wonderfully readable. Kafka, Nabokov, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all make their appearances...and strange lists of newsworthy events cascade down before us now and again. It's a fitting follow-up to Calendar of Regrets and beautifully written. --Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgrenand Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders The moment in which you awaken is on fire. You are alive or the other thing, falling to scorched earth or ascending to the rooftops of Berlin, a radiantly red heaven. You feel yourself besieged, swirling inside one startling sensibility and then another, deliriums of joy pierced by devastations of loss and sorrow. Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven, Otto Freundlich's abstract cubist painting, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint, turning his fiercely attentive, unbounded love to every being in every moment, exposing infinite unknown dimensions, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment. --Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River, Silence & Song Where to stand in this original novel as History that unspeakably painfully hurts while montaging all our astonishing, poignant, and gross ironies. Between lives, even our own, that are less here than nearby or elsewhere; between Dietrich and Heisenberg; between, on one hand (literally), Arendt and Heidegger showering and thinking about thinking, and deaths there perhaps are no words for; between what is actually, terribly being evoked and, dissolve after dissolve, an exquisite narrative prose risking again and again an incorrigible lightness. At random, I thought of Wittgenstein in Duffy's The World as I Found It; dictatorship in Spufford's Red Plenty; the sculptural work of Joseph Beuys; and, where fact seems all the more fact in a context of fictive documentation, the great Sebald. --Joseph McElroy, author of Women and Men and Cannonball My Red Heaven is interesting and difficult, ambitious, audacious and smart. Like a Teutonic James Joyce, Lance Olsen is pushing at boundaries. --John Haskell, author of Out of My Skin and The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts Olsen's My Red Heaven is a superb evocation of a specific time and place--Berlin, 10 June 1927--that captures the intellectual ferment, the descent into decadence, and rise of Nazism during the Weimar Republic. With historically precise detailing and grimly gorgeous imagery, Olsen portrays a number of notable people traversing the day, conveyed from a variety of points-of-view--even a dog's--and in a variety of 1920s forms: Joycean interior monologue, Dos Passosian newsreel, UFA film script, Benjaminian notes, and more. An intellectual and stylistic tour de force from one of America's most consistently innovative writers. --Steven Moore, author of The Novel, An Alternative History Dreamlives whirls dreamlike, its settings unsettled even during the early chapters. The language isn't just poetic, it's telegraphic, and scenes take place at warp speed. -The Brooklyn Rail Lance Olsen radically reshapes the myth of the Minotaur in his brilliantly conceived novel Dreamlives of Debris. Reworking the myth, he transforms it, widens and deepens it as we read along, the act of reading itself becoming movement within a labyrinth. ... Dreamlives of Debris is a machine to think with, one that transports the reader by extraordinary means, a book that challenges received notions about what constitutes story and storytelling. -Entropy Dreamlives isn't a singular dream but a collection of a castaway's inner thoughts. Shunning the momentum that comes from traditional plot and character development, Lance Olsen--an author known for innovative, genre-trespassing narratives--challenges the reader to make sense of the book's internal reality. -Fiction Advocate Lance Olsen's new novel Dreamlives of Debris explores the Thesesus and Minotaur myth through Debris, a deformed girl/monster hidden in a labyrinth--or what Olsen calls a 'liquid architecture.' Each page, devoid of a page number, is a turn or fall in the labyrinth in which Debris accesses shimmers--voices--through history while navigating her desires. -Propeller Magazine Dreamlives of Debris is a stunning song cycle on the pixelation of memory in a hyperdigitalized universe, opening out into an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful meditation on nothing less than the erasure of time itself. -David Shields, author of Reality Hunger Like the minotaur it invokes, Lance Olsen's Dreamlives of Debris is a great hybrid creature, surprising and mysterious and imbued with new power. Perhaps born of such parents as Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and Ben Marcus' Age of Wire and String, Olsen's novel is finally entirely its own brilliant monster: courageous with the inexhaustibility of its myth, unfettered by the usual conventions of linear storytelling, destined to challenge and change any reader brave enough to delve its fantastic labyrinth of language. -Matt Bell, author of Scrapper Lance Olsen opens up an astonishing world of thought and emotion-a place distant but familiar that hangs almost out of the reach of our daily perception. A place we have only glimpsed at moments. A world that we have longed for all along, and have nearly forgotten. Through Olsen's magic and fragments and echoes this world comes back in uncanny and haunting ways. A beautiful and moving reading experience, Dreamlives of Debris is a unique and impressive achievement. -Carole Maso, author of Mother & Child In a rapturous fusion of myth, premonition, philosophy, and human history, Dreamlives of Debris delivers us to the pure poetry of perception. I fell in love with Debris. Monstrous in form, radiant in spirit, she hears everyone: Sappho, Sophocles, Borges, Plato, a traveler on the Silk Road, Danielle Steele, Justin Bieber. Brigitte Reimann grieves her own diminishment as Bradley Manning explains his transition to Chelsea. No words seem more profound or true than any other. Those who dare to listen this way will be transfigured, scattered through time and space, bewildered, ecstatically alive, forever lost in a vast labyrinth of infinite possibilities. -Melanie Rae Thon, author of Voice of the River, Silence & Song, and The 7th Man Breaking boundaries of horror, science fiction, nonfiction, love story, and myth, this rare and brilliant novel reinvents the female 'monster' in the form of a disfigured girl. Subverting the hero's journey, Debris goes on a quest to find her self within an impossible labyrinth where architecture mirrors the disfigured female body, imprisoning and revealing a girl monster who stands between humanity and the darkness. In this world where what seems to be monstrous is more human than human, the stories most difficult to tell are the ones we most need to be told. - Aimee Parkison, author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman
Rarely is genuine innovation this heartfelt. Through erudition and capacious prose, Olsen achieves a kind of cultural autopsy of an inflamed space and time. The result is a privileged view of naked humanity, consoled by art, science, and the rest, but ultimately unable to escape its baseness. A powerful work. --Sergio de la Pava, author of Lost Empress and Personae Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what is it to be alive. -Carole Maso, author of Ava and The Art Lover In this twenty-four-hour novel, Olsen explores new subjectivities and new histories both after and before the moments directly written about. It's fascinating and wonderfully readable. Kafka, Nabokov, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all make their appearances...and strange lists of newsworthy events cascade down before us now and again. It's a fitting follow-up to Calendar of Regrets and beautifully written. --Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgrenand Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders The moment in which you awaken is on fire. You are alive or the other thing, falling to scorched earth or ascending to the rooftops of Berlin, a radiantly red heaven. You feel yourself besieged, swirling inside one startling sensibility and then another, deliriums of joy pierced by devastations of loss and sorrow. Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven, Otto Freundlich's abstract cubist painting, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint, turning his fiercely attentive, unbounded love to every being in every moment, exposing infinite unknown dimensions, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment. --Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River, Silence & Song Dreamlives whirls dreamlike, its settings unsettled even during the early chapters. The language isn't just poetic, it's telegraphic, and scenes take place at warp speed. -The Brooklyn Rail Lance Olsen radically reshapes the myth of the Minotaur in his brilliantly conceived novel Dreamlives of Debris. Reworking the myth, he transforms it, widens and deepens it as we read along, the act of reading itself becoming movement within a labyrinth. ... Dreamlives of Debris is a machine to think with, one that transports the reader by extraordinary means, a book that challenges received notions about what constitutes story and storytelling. -Entropy Dreamlives isn't a singular dream but a collection of a castaway's inner thoughts. Shunning the momentum that comes from traditional plot and character development, Lance Olsen--an author known for innovative, genre-trespassing narratives--challenges the reader to make sense of the book's internal reality. -Fiction Advocate Lance Olsen's new novel Dreamlives of Debris explores the Thesesus and Minotaur myth through Debris, a deformed girl/monster hidden in a labyrinth--or what Olsen calls a 'liquid architecture.' Each page, devoid of a page number, is a turn or fall in the labyrinth in which Debris accesses shimmers--voices--through history while navigating her desires. -Propeller Magazine Dreamlives of Debris is a stunning song cycle on the pixelation of memory in a hyperdigitalized universe, opening out into an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful meditation on nothing less than the erasure of time itself. -David Shields, author of Reality Hunger Like the minotaur it invokes, Lance Olsen's Dreamlives of Debris is a great hybrid creature, surprising and mysterious and imbued with new power. Perhaps born of such parents as Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and Ben Marcus' Age of Wire and String, Olsen's novel is finally entirely its own brilliant monster: courageous with the inexhaustibility of its myth, unfettered by the usual conventions of linear storytelling, destined to challenge and change any reader brave enough to delve its fantastic labyrinth of language. -Matt Bell, author of Scrapper Lance Olsen opens up an astonishing world of thought and emotion-a place distant but familiar that hangs almost out of the reach of our daily perception. A place we have only glimpsed at moments. A world that we have longed for all along, and have nearly forgotten. Through Olsen's magic and fragments and echoes this world comes back in uncanny and haunting ways. A beautiful and moving reading experience, Dreamlives of Debris is a unique and impressive achievement. -Carole Maso, author of Mother & Child In a rapturous fusion of myth, premonition, philosophy, and human history, Dreamlives of Debris delivers us to the pure poetry of perception. I fell in love with Debris. Monstrous in form, radiant in spirit, she hears everyone: Sappho, Sophocles, Borges, Plato, a traveler on the Silk Road, Danielle Steele, Justin Bieber. Brigitte Reimann grieves her own diminishment as Bradley Manning explains his transition to Chelsea. No words seem more profound or true than any other. Those who dare to listen this way will be transfigured, scattered through time and space, bewildered, ecstatically alive, forever lost in a vast labyrinth of infinite possibilities. -Melanie Rae Thon, author of Voice of the River, Silence & Song, and The 7th Man Breaking boundaries of horror, science fiction, nonfiction, love story, and myth, this rare and brilliant novel reinvents the female 'monster' in the form of a disfigured girl. Subverting the hero's journey, Debris goes on a quest to find her self within an impossible labyrinth where architecture mirrors the disfigured female body, imprisoning and revealing a girl monster who stands between humanity and the darkness. In this world where what seems to be monstrous is more human than human, the stories most difficult to tell are the ones we most need to be told. - Aimee Parkison, author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman
""The combined effect of the different styles on display here is virtuosic, but Olsen never loses sight of the bigger scope of history—or the tragedies the future will hold for most of these characters. This novel manages the impressive task of being both experimental and accessible—and thoroughly moving to boot."" —Kirkus Reviews ""Inspired by German artist Otto Freundlich’s painting of the same title, this meditation on the effects of a specific moment in history and the human condition reaches past cultural barriers and time to create a narrative that pushes boundaries and reflects on what is means to dwell in the here and now."" —Publishers Weekly ""Innovative, unpredictable, and revelatory."" —Vol. 1 Brooklyn ""Olsen employs a full suite of experimental techniques to tell the story, including newsreel headlines, screenplay excerpts, poetic verses, and ekphrastic reflections on unsettling scenes of bombed-out and abandoned buildings. But the real draw is Olsen’s supple, exacting prose, which captures the energy of cutting-edge art movements amid impending political uncertainty. There’s an eerie familiarity to the air of technological and social breakthroughs, with fallout or resolution just around the corner."" —Booklist ""My Red Heaven is the most accessible of Lance Olsen’s works of literature. His writing is as brilliant as ever, from dialogue to choice of just enough items to describe to bring a reader a sense of mise en scène without bogging down the story in excess. His ability to live and speak as multitudes with distinct minds and voices is astonishing."" —The London Economic ""Olsen is a fine, clear stylist. ... My Red Heaven captures the eeriness of a city on the brink of an epochal descent into barbarism."" —Wall Street Journal ""Lance Olsen is as innovative as he is prolific and an irreplaceable figure in avant-garde fiction. ... Told in vignettes that are formally daring, yet always musical and accessible, this is a powerful book in every respect and an important one for readers here in this country in 2020."" —Robert Lopez for The Believer ""The fleeting encounters of the famous and not-so-famous dead, in their own voices, sketch out a vanishing moment in a Berlin on the brink. Lance Olsen's My Red Heaven is a work of necromantic dazzlement."" —Shelley Jackson, author of Riddance, Half Life, and The Melancholy of Anatomy ""Rarely is genuine innovation this heartfelt. Through erudition and capacious prose, Olsen achieves a kind of cultural autopsy of an inflamed space and time. The result is a privileged view of naked humanity, consoled by art, science, and the rest, but ultimately unable to escape its baseness. A powerful work.” —Sergio de la Pava, author of Lost Empress and Personae ""Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what is it to be alive.” —Carole Maso, author of Ava and The Art Lover ""In this twenty-four-hour novel, Olsen explores new subjectivities and new histories both after and before the moments directly written about. It's fascinating and wonderfully readable. Kafka, Nabokov, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all make their appearances...and strange lists of newsworthy events cascade down before us now and again. It's a fitting follow-up to Calendar of Regrets and beautifully written. —Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgrenand Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders ""The moment in which you awaken is on fire. You are alive or the other thing, falling to scorched earth or ascending to the rooftops of Berlin, a radiantly red heaven. You feel yourself besieged, swirling inside one startling sensibility and then another, deliriums of joy pierced by devastations of loss and sorrow. Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven, Otto Freundlich’s abstract cubist painting, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint, turning his fiercely attentive, unbounded love to every being in every moment, exposing infinite unknown dimensions, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment."" —Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River, Silence & Song ""Where to stand in this original novel as History that unspeakably painfully hurts while montaging all our astonishing, poignant, and gross ironies. Between lives, even our own, that are less here than nearby or elsewhere; between Dietrich and Heisenberg; between, on one hand (literally), Arendt and Heidegger showering and thinking about thinking, and deaths there perhaps are no words for; between what is actually, terribly being evoked and, dissolve after dissolve, an exquisite narrative prose risking again and again an incorrigible lightness. At random, I thought of Wittgenstein in Duffy’s The World as I Found It; dictatorship in Spufford’s Red Plenty; the sculptural work of Joseph Beuys; and, where fact seems all the more fact in a context of fictive documentation, the great Sebald."" —Joseph McElroy, author of Women and Men and Cannonball ""My Red Heaven is interesting and difficult, ambitious, audacious and smart. Like a Teutonic James Joyce, Lance Olsen is pushing at boundaries.” —John Haskell, author of Out of My Skin and The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts ""Olsen’s My Red Heaven is a superb evocation of a specific time and place—Berlin, 10 June 1927—that captures the intellectual ferment, the descent into decadence, and rise of Nazism during the Weimar Republic. With historically precise detailing and grimly gorgeous imagery, Olsen portrays a number of notable people traversing the day, conveyed from a variety of points-of-view—even a dog’s—and in a variety of 1920s forms: Joycean interior monologue, Dos Passosian newsreel, UFA film script, Benjaminian notes, and more. An intellectual and stylistic tour de force from one of America’s most consistently innovative writers."" —Steven Moore, author of The Novel, An Alternative History
