It seems like a sign of liberation—of adulthood’s indefinite postponement—when Partisans bomb the university and every student’s personal records, from transcripts to debts, are consumed in erasing fire. If nothing else, it lends Margaux the freedom to continue her preferred art form of list-making unfettered by the authority of academia--until she encounters the breakdowns and disappearances and deaths of the people she admires and cherishes most. A monochromatic painter. A BDSM documentary photographer. A transgendered Aphrodite. A mathematician with an invisible cat. Yet as the concrete details of her world dissolve into the abstraction of loss, they also become more rarefied, more essential. Something small enough to be contained. Small enough to be protected.

Set in a semi-fictional, post-industrial American warzone, this novel explores multiple facets related to the recent nonfictional decades of constant civil unrest, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of holding a personal creative life amidst a time of constant violence and change. Despite its heavy themes, the narrative is threaded throughout with veins of absurdist humor that invite and welcome us into the familial warmth of the narrator’s memories of friendship. 

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of two previous novels—To Sleep as Animals and Our Shadows’ Voice—the short story collection Blue of the World, and the family history Any Less You. A founding member of the post-jazz chamber septet The Plaster Cramp, Milliken lives in Saco, Maine.

Center
Periphery
Plane
Insideness
Outsideness
Containment

Acknowledgements