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3 books match the query 'Swope Mitchell, Lia'
Kree
A Post-Exotic Noveldraeger
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
A warrior struggles through an apocalyptic landscape and the world after death
Kree Toronto has been raised as a warrior in a ravaged world: postapocalyptic, posthuman, the population decimated by wars and civilization long since collapsed. After her attempt to avenge the death of her dog, Loka, goes horribly wrong, Kree finds herself lost in a world after death and wanders into the city of the terrible mendicants.
Under the Brothers’ totalitarian rule, Kree can lead a quiet life and forget her violent past, even if needles grow in her skull and hallucinatory blood rains pour down now and then to remind her. She can make friends: a shamanic healer with a shaking tent, a mysterious stranger hatched from an egg, and a gruff Tibetan electrician in a world without electricity. And she can have her Loka as long as she toes the Party line and does as she’s told. When she can’t—when her friends start to disappear and the Brothers turn against her—Kree sets out on a quest, searching for a new way forward.
Multiply reincarnated and unstuck in time, Kree is the characteristically marvelous creation of Manuela Draeger, whose extraordinary stories, in the words of author China Miéville, “are as close to dreams as fiction can be.”
Living in Fire
A Post-Exotic NovelAntoine Volodine
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
A soldier engulfed in napalm suspends his death by composing a family saga in which he learns to live within the flames
Do not remain on the fire’s edge, find your way to the heart of the fire and do not leave. . . . Death does not exist as long as you reject it. A soldier watches an airplane dropping napalm on his position. In the instant before his fiery death, he does not see his life flash before his eyes. Instead, he improvises a novel, one that screams out of him at high speed.
In his story, Sam wanders a postapocalyptic landscape of broken cities and empty steppes for days, years, centuries. Through a series of blackly comic, dreamlike, bizarre scenes, he gleans lessons imparted by the weird and violent members of his family, including sorceress Aunt Yoanna, doomed Uncle Slutov, and two sharp-shooting cousins who try to persuade him to kill their mother. Sam’s clan teaches him how to accept his fate and live in the world of flames with no fear for the future.
The forty-ninth novel in the post-exotic series and the last to appear under the name Antoine Volodine, Living in Fire includes an interview with the writer about this book’s place in his overall project, its literary and cinematic influences, and its thematic connections with other works in the sequence. A triumphant conclusion to an epic experiment, Living in Fire cuts through a world aflame using dark humor, flights of fantasy, and radical acceptance.
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Survival of the Fireflies
Georges Didi-Huberman
University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Seeking out the minor lights of friendship in a time of fascism
Dante once spoke, in his Divine Comedy, of the miniscule lights, in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, who, contrary to the great lights that shined bright within the sublime circles of Paradise, frailly wandered in the somber pockets of glimmering light within the darkness. Pliny the Elder was once preoccupied by a type of fly named pyrallis or pyrotocon, which was only able to fly within fire: “as long as it remains in the fire, it can fly; when its flight takes it out too far a distance, it dies.”
Through his readings of Dante, Pasolini, Walter Benjamin, and others, Georges Didi-Huberman seeks again to understand this strange, minor light, the signals of small beings in search of love and friendship. Their flickering presence serves as a counterforce to the blinding sovereign power that Giorgio Agamben calls The Kingdom and the Glory, that artificial brilliance that once surrounded dictators and today emanates from every screen. In this timely reflection, much needed in our time of excessive light, Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies offers a humble yet powerful image of individual hope and desire: the firefly-image.