Phosphor in Dreamland

Paperback
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Winner of the Critic's Choice Award of 1995

Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet's dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity.

Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island's 17th-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island's exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza.

The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet's previous novel (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), was described by one reviewer as "Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll." Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.

Details

ISBN-10 1-56478-084-8

ISBN-13 9781564780843

Publication Date Oct 1995

Nb of pages 192

Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

Onix

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Reviews

Press Reviews

Chicago Tribune

[Ducornet] writes like a stunned time-traveler, testifying in breathless fragments to exotic ages that have gone or never were . . . It's startling and refreshing to encounter a writer whose work insists so relentlessly upon the magic of making tales.

Washington Post

In the bizarre world of Rikki Ducornet's fiction, laughter and terror hold hands in an uneasy truce and almost anything can happen.

Library Journal

The author's fertile narrative combines the magic of Garcia Marquez with the eroticism of Henry Miller, seducing narrator and reader with a string of astonishing revelations on love, sex, and the epiphanies found when dreaming.

The London Times

Ducornet's novel is both incoherent and astonishing, a complex fantasia redolent of Swift and Borges, but stranger than both.

Publishers Weekly

Ducornet has created a book that is both touching and slyly funny.

Los Angeles Times

Phosphor in Dreamland is one of the finest persuasions to date for the life of the erotic, the sensual . . . Rikki Ducornet is a writer whose work deserves our joyous attention.

New York Times Book Review

Phosphor in Dreamland is a book unlike any you have read before.

LA Weekly

You almost feel the story giving birth as you read. By the story's end, you cannot help but agree with Ducornet that, though evil may prevail temporarily, art, love and goodness have a way of eternally resurrecting themselves.

Booklist

In a simulated, aboriginal dreamtime, Ducornet, like the narrator and Phosphor, is inventive, is in love (if only with imagination), and has a full-fledged, bizarre, and entertaining vision.

Kirkus

Ducornet's fabulous narrative contrivances offer the serious reader both an unusual challenge and a dreamy scape from the constrictions of realism. She's something of a mythical beast herself: a surrealist with a sense of humor, and also a sense of history.

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Genres : Fiction : United States and Canada
Countries : United States of America

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