Reading Wednesday - Cascade

[radiantfracture]

It's here! I backed Rachel Ash Rosen's Cascade, the first book of the Sleep of Reason series, on Kickstarter, and the publisher turned the project around like that. I am delighted.



I read and admired some of this novel in draft form, but there's something about having it in a proper cover, with blurbs, that gives it a shimmering apocalyptic finality.

I have just begun to re-read, but already its ludic fury entangles me like a, well, it'll have to be a kraken. I don't know if I've made the comparison to Philip K. Dick before, but that's what comes to me now -- that raging surrealism -- and the grief embedded in power -- in particular, the pitfalls of precognition. Everything in Dick is an elegy. Cascade is maybe more a fearfully cogent rant over the casket.

One of the backer perks was some great postcardage:



Impossible to describe how accurate this postcard is unless you already know.

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Recently finished Bernadine Evaristo's Mr. Loverman and Jen Sookfong Lee's Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private Idaho. I think I'll use part of the introduction of Gentlemen of the Shade in my creative writing course -- Lee talks about the way a particular work of art, hitting your life at the right moment, can fracture and illuminate it.

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I'm also currently reading Time Shelter, recommended by sabotabby -- I love it. For whatever reason, your cold-war-inflected postmodern novel of the fruitless yet unending search for meaning is my sweet spot. This one is, I think, new, but it has that voice of desolation and formal brilliance that I love and had not realized how much I missed.

{rf}

Comments

[sovay]

I have just begun to re-read, but already its ludic fury entangles me like a, well, it'll have to be a kraken.

That sounds attractive to me.