Incarcerated for his subversive connection to the old, living world, a prisoner makes the most of his isolation in this captivating allegorical tale about tyranny, conviction, and the enduring power of imagination.

Upon setting out for a morning walk with his knobby stick in hand, a young man is arrested by a robot called the Plotinus and abandoned in a cell where one beam of sunlight beckons through an air duct. Rapping his knuckles against the vent to relay his tale of woe in code, he recalls his lost love and their group's forbidden activities; his readings in philosophy and the sciences; and sweet memories of freedom's small pleasures. As the captive confronts his increasingly dire circumstances with rigorous optimism, the appearance of fantastical visitors and miraculous objects in his cell further blurs the line between hallucination and dystopian reality. Told with uncanny warmth and intellectual brio, The Plotinus is Rikki Ducornet's most unforgettable story yet.

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About the Author
The author of nine novels as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poems, Rikki Ducornet has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, honored twice by the Lannan Foundation, and the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Widely published abroad, Ducornet is also a painter who exhibits internationally. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Reviews

Praise for The Plotinus

"Dashingly absurd. . . . Ducornet's latest is replete with figures that represent mankind in all its vainglorious hubris to great comedic effect while echoing the familiar sorrow of humanity's severance from, and ultimate destruction of, the natural world that gives us both our meaning and our memories. It is a surreal novel that, nonetheless, feels disconcertingly real. . . . An inscrutable wonder of a book that rewards a reader's attention with its own returned gaze." -Kirkus, starred review

"When all the beauty left in a denuded world is concentrated in the delicate body of a visiting hornet, what else is there for a narrator (or for us) to do but love her. So The Plotinus shows us. This book is elegant, hilarious, ominous, and transcendent." -Rae Armantrout

"So new, so strange. . . . It enthralled me." -Forrest Gander

Praise for Trafik:

"In a future where all that's left of Earth are the records of random trivia, a human-ish astronaut and her robot companion decide to abandon their mission. . . . On this journey, the two will confront the biggest questions about existence, identity, and experience: What makes a human? Where does consciousness reside? It could all become very serious, if Ducornet weren't so skilled in absurdity." -Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed

"Illustrative of the dream logic of surrealist novels, Nadja, Hopscotch, or Leonora Carrington's Hearing Trumpet. All in all, the result is essential Ducornet, obscure and extravagant. This space operetta shouts like Ubu Roi. Ducornet delivers a fascinating addition to her incredible practice. A Jupiter fuse against the void." -Joseph Houlihan, Chicago Review of Books

"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 dazzles with this whirlwind jaunt through a far-future universe, told in jargon-studded prose that turns gonzo science into gleeful lyricism. . . . Ducornet remains a fantastic stylist." -Publishers Weekly

"I loved this mind-bending little trek across the universe. Thoroughly delightful, poignant, funny, and sweet, like if Italo Calvino wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a series of pointed vignettes, it's the perfect amount of quarantine-relatable loneliness and existential spiraling, combined with escapism and optimism. It's like watching a dream come true." -Rachel S., Harvard Bookstore for Buzzfeed

"A highly literate science fiction quest narrative, a 21st-century version of Calvino's Cosmicomics. . . . Trafik is a compact singularity that explodes in a Big Bang of creativity. -James Crossley, Madison Books

"A perfectly strange and surreal book, dreamlike and fun." -Sarah Cassavant, Subtext Books

"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." -The 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

Selected praise for Rikki Ducornet:

"Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope." -The 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

"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

"Ducornet is a mad maestro of words." -Seattle Weekly

"Rikki Ducornet is a magic sensualist, a writer's writer, a master of language, a unique voice." -Amy Tan

Book Information
ISBN 9781566896818
Author Rikki Ducornet
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint Coffee House Press
Publisher Coffee House Press