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WINNER OF THE CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A technocratic collapse erases an obscure poet from existence, she and her pet moss ball refuse to disappear

Marimo, Mon Amour is a surreal, contemplative novel set in the quarantined borough of Alphabet City, where a botched data migration leaves obscure poet Zinger Zingiber effectively erased from the record. Furloughed from her jobs as a dumpling-maker and asylum specialist, she withdraws to her apartment with only her pet moss ball, Marimo, for company. As the Bureau of Misidentification bans forbidden words and controls identity, Zinger appoints herself the “Minister of Loneliness,” observing a world suspended in time.

From this quiet refuge, Zinger meditates on solitude, the fragility of memory, and the small, ephemeral moments that become acts of meaning. Her narration drifts between dream and reality, blending whimsy with philosophical inquiry. Lyrical and recursive, the novel draws on the psychological depth of Dostoevsky and the surreal sensibilities of Italo Calvino and Yoko Ogawa as it explores agency a plague of absentia. Marimo, Mon Amour will appeal to readers of literary and speculative fiction, fans of surreal or philosophical narratives, and anyone drawn to meditations on isolation, resistance, and the endurance of the human spirit.

A postapocalyptic noir that asks if love and political ideals can survive civilizational collapse

A meditative, postapocalyptic noir, Mevlido’s Dreams is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse. Mevlido is a double agent working for the police and living in the last habitable city on the planet, a sprawling abyssal ruin marked by war and ruled by criminals. Suspended in the bardo between his loyalty to the surveillance state and to the anarchists, communists, and other rebels he monitors, Mevlido clings to life and hope—barely—in the city’s vast slums, haunted by the memory of the wife he failed to save during the last war and dreaming of a mysterious mission he is told he must accomplish. At the same time, an enigmatic organization existing elsewhere—the Organs—observes Mevlido’s actions and debates its responsibility to him and to humanity as a whole. 

Asking what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world, this dense, brilliantly detailed postcollapse reality imagined by Antoine Volodine is one that grows ever more relevant amidst intensifying climate and political catastrophes. A key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe, Mevlido’s Dreams envisions a world changed beyond recognition and ruled under irrational authoritarianism in which dreams nest within dreams and the boundaries between life and death are fluid and uncertain.