Trafik

Praise for Trafik: A winsome space picaresque in which surreality piles upon surreality. . . . A longtime master of the extraordinary sentence, Ducornet has outdone herself here, blending SF's penchant for invented jargon with her own queer linguistic egalitarianism. . . . in a primordial soup of possibility. This slender book captivates with its ferocious curiosity, quick wit, and ultimately tender generosity. Carried along by the bumptious rollick of its language, this tale is full of sound and fury, signifying literally everything. -Kirkus, starred review Ducornet has written the oddest of varsity novels, one that anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence. -Publishers Weekly Surrealism meets space opera in Trafik, Rikki Ducornet's startlingly original look at a post-human and non-human pairing wandering through space while obsessed with the scattered fragments of a world they never knew. At once funny and absurd, Trafik peers at our own time through the lens of the future to reveal what we should regret losing and what would be better gone. -Brian Evenson Praise for Brightfellow: Ms. Ducornet's novel about a man who 'cannot fathom the bottomless secret of his own existence' casts a lingering spell. -New York Times In tracing the shape of what is left behind, Ducornet lends dignity to the universal plight of vanished illusions. -Los Angeles Times Bursting with vivid imagery, beautiful language, heartbreaking characters. . . .Ducornet's tale is unique and captivating. -Booklist A portrait of a surreal community that defies easy categorization. . . . An endless delight at the sentence level. -Kirkus Ducornet has written the oddest of varsity novels, one that anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence. -Publishers Weekly Praise for Rikki Ducornet: Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope. -New York Times Linguistically explosive. . . . One of the most interesting American writers around. -The Nation Pick up a book by the award-winning Ducornet, and you know it will be startling, elegant, and perfectly formed. -Library Journal Storytelling that enchants the senses. -The Boston Globe Ducornet is a writer of extraordinary power, in whose books 'rigor and imagination' (her watchwords) perform with the grace and daring of high-wire acrobats. -BOMB Ducornet's is a world of surfaces so rich and textured that notions of meaning and interpretation are subsumed under a lush and seductive prose that eventually inhabits readers' minds. -The Millions [R]eveals strangeness in the most basic circumstances of life, flooding them in new light. -Kenyon Review Ducornet is a mad maestro of words. -Seattle Weekly Writer, poet, and artist Ducornet does things with words most authors would never even dream of. -Men's Journal Rikki Ducornet is a magic sensualist, a writer's writer, a master of language, a unique voice. -Amy Tan It is Rikki Ducornet's magic to be able to coax an entire universe-'restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence'-out of the modest and often grim contours of one man's life. -Kathryn Davis Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet's passionate, caring, and accomplished career. Its readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon's knife. And the rendering? The rendering is as good as it gets. -William Gass Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life's harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound. -Joanna Scott Rikki Ducornet is imagination's emissary to this mundane world. -Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books