Cosmogony
Stories
by Lucy Ives
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Pub Date Mar 09 2021 | Archive Date Mar 09 2021
Soft Skull Press | Soft Skull
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Description
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.
Advance Praise
A Paperback Paris Most Anticipated Book
"In this collection of short stories, Ives time travels, hallucinates, and performs magic to speak about the mystical qualities of the mundane. The stories all meander into something unexpected before exploding in truth and keen observations of human nature . . . Ives has the rare ability to boomerang reality totally out of whack before calling it home in an even purer form." —Booklist
"Cosmogony, [Ives'] debut short story collection, takes on daily absurdities and the subtle supernatural, playing with format as she weaves in Wikipedia entries, text messages, and science equations." —Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
"There is perhaps no author better able to confront the acute absurdities of our reality than Lucy Ives, who veritably tackles the derangements of our era with glee, clarity, and brilliance. In this story collection, Ives touches on the mundane—from memes to porn to errand-running—offering up a version of life that is all the more authentic for its wholly surreal elements (time travel; living underwater). But then, this is what Ives does best: By offering up a kaleidoscope rather than a microscope through which to view our world, she presents us with something more glittery and beautiful and endlessly faceted than we could see if we were looking at it with our own eyes." —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29, One of the Best New Books of the Year
"Inventive . . . Structurally ingenious . . . Through juxtaposition and collage, these stories illuminate the trickier fringes of life right now." —Publishers Weekly
“A series of impossibly clever riffs on familiar features of modern life . . . from a mind that just won’t stop.”—Kirkus Reviews
"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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781593765996 |
| PRICE | $16.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 256 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Educator 767116
These are playful and intelligent stories that delve at times into surrealism, are curious about the world, and the act of making. The opening piece follows an aspiring porn writer with unwieldy creative prowess; the title story imagines relations between a devil and angel. Others feature a character cheating at a game of Murder; a dialogue-driven examination of the origins of male violence and the effectiveness of the whisper network. Some pieces are explicitly metafictional in addressing the narrative process: “These aren’t real people, and yet these really are the things they really say and think and do.” Ives’ experiments in form are fun and impressive, as in one story that adopts the form of a Wikipedia article, or one of my favourites, which tackles the second person. Whatever form Ives adopts, COSMOGONY is self-aware and wary of the stories we tell ourselves and others, complimented by exuberant narrators and funny, well-crafted characters.
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