Headless World, or, The Problem of Time
SKU:
40497
$20.00
$20.00
per item
JUST PUBLISHED
ISBN 978-1-62054-049-7
336 pages, 5.5 x 8.5”, trade paperback
Composed of one hundred thirty-one chapters divided midway by a solid red page, Headless World confronts the "invention" of Time within the universe of human experience, memory and desire. Impressionistic, disruptive, and hermetically philosophical, this is a strangely alluring, disturbingly prophetic, and comically horrifying fiction. The edges between human reality and inhuman fantasy are sharply observed and imbued with saturated colors, sensual cravings, sonic banality, ontological mystery, and theatrical cruelty — all amid an encroaching trans-human future.
"A strange object, unlike any other book you’ll ever read, relentless, hilarious, a ferocious trance, a secret key. The final Ascher/Straus novel will help you think about time and memory and what’s been missing from the screens that replaced our heads—almost all of us, almost everything. A brilliant lucid dream about technologies that continue to root so deeply into reality that they’ve become the fairy tales we recite to children as we’re decapitating them one more time.”—Stephen Beachy, author of the novels Glory Hole and boneyard
"The hope of transcendence arrives in the form of a novel that escapes the spoor of endless mechanical reproduction, in a narrative-channel that defies any viral popular culture logic—it’s a 'twirling spindle of infinity,' a black hole devouring itself as it churns. I’m so in love with this book.” — Rachel Nagelberg, author of The Fifth Wall
"The 'genius-flash' of this book lies not so much in its ideas, which it is coy about, as in the thorough and uncompromising enactment of their implications, utilizing the qualities of the novelistic form to shift between theory and the concrete of consciousness. Its characters exist in a literary-aesthetic state only. There is something poignant in their struggle to come to terms with being different people on different days, unsure if their identities have made it continuously from one waking day to the next, and unsure if they have stepped across the threshold into someone else’s fictional story. The novel is like the great novels, a mirror of our condition, as opposed to the virtual reality experienced in the fictions we consume daily, which are insidiously made coherent. We recognize this headless world, but it’s never been presented this way to us before." — Alvin Lu
Alvin Lu's full review essay of Headless World (first published in Rain Taxi):alvinlu.co/city-god/headless-world-by-ascherstraus
ISBN 978-1-62054-049-7
336 pages, 5.5 x 8.5”, trade paperback
Composed of one hundred thirty-one chapters divided midway by a solid red page, Headless World confronts the "invention" of Time within the universe of human experience, memory and desire. Impressionistic, disruptive, and hermetically philosophical, this is a strangely alluring, disturbingly prophetic, and comically horrifying fiction. The edges between human reality and inhuman fantasy are sharply observed and imbued with saturated colors, sensual cravings, sonic banality, ontological mystery, and theatrical cruelty — all amid an encroaching trans-human future.
"A strange object, unlike any other book you’ll ever read, relentless, hilarious, a ferocious trance, a secret key. The final Ascher/Straus novel will help you think about time and memory and what’s been missing from the screens that replaced our heads—almost all of us, almost everything. A brilliant lucid dream about technologies that continue to root so deeply into reality that they’ve become the fairy tales we recite to children as we’re decapitating them one more time.”—Stephen Beachy, author of the novels Glory Hole and boneyard
"The hope of transcendence arrives in the form of a novel that escapes the spoor of endless mechanical reproduction, in a narrative-channel that defies any viral popular culture logic—it’s a 'twirling spindle of infinity,' a black hole devouring itself as it churns. I’m so in love with this book.” — Rachel Nagelberg, author of The Fifth Wall
"The 'genius-flash' of this book lies not so much in its ideas, which it is coy about, as in the thorough and uncompromising enactment of their implications, utilizing the qualities of the novelistic form to shift between theory and the concrete of consciousness. Its characters exist in a literary-aesthetic state only. There is something poignant in their struggle to come to terms with being different people on different days, unsure if their identities have made it continuously from one waking day to the next, and unsure if they have stepped across the threshold into someone else’s fictional story. The novel is like the great novels, a mirror of our condition, as opposed to the virtual reality experienced in the fictions we consume daily, which are insidiously made coherent. We recognize this headless world, but it’s never been presented this way to us before." — Alvin Lu
Alvin Lu's full review essay of Headless World (first published in Rain Taxi):alvinlu.co/city-god/headless-world-by-ascherstraus