Absolute Away by Lance Olsen
With Lance Olsen’s signature flair, Absolute Away is an innovative narrative triptych, a story of one life reimagined.
The first movement tells the story of Edie Metzger, a little Jewish girl who bit Hermann Göring’s lip so hard it bled at a Nazi book-burning rally in 1933. In the second, in 1956, grown Edie is the passenger clinging to the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, moments before it plunges off the road. In the third, the narrative embarks into an ever-unspooling universe of Edies that might have lived—Edie’s gender, past, and consciousness flying forever farther apart.
Absolute Away is a novel about travel in its largest sense—about the self, the past, the future, aging, ideas, relationships, our own mortal being(s) as transitive verbs, and how what and who we are connects to everything else.
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Paperback
ISBN: 9781950539956
PRAISE FOR ABSOLUTE AWAY
"Through the roiling thunderstorm and utter marvelousness of his exuberant imagination, Lance Olsen rescues Edith Metzger from the oblivion of her violent death to reinvent her with the crackling skinfizz and full-body thrill of a Jackson Pollock painting. This jazz improvisation of a novel will open and wreck you as you enter the miraculously weird shimmerings of the infinite and absolute away where identity shreds into a proliferation of possibilities—where anyone might have been, might still become, wildly, spectacularly other." –Melanie Rae Thon, composer of As If Fire Could Hide Us
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lance Olsen is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels My Red Heaven (Dzanc, 2020) and Dreamlives of Debris (Dzanc, 2017). His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, such as Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Village Voice, BOMB, McSweeney’s, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he taught experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.
