The Book of Embers

project details

Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, The Book of Embers re-envisions what a book can be—labyrinth, fugue, hologram of inquiry—to rewrite literary possibility from the inside out.

Loosely guided by the musings of a modern-day Ariadne, this genre-defiant work traces the spiral path of language, lineage, and what it means to live at the edge of story, self, and structure. It braids fiction, essay, art history, and memoir into a thread that tunnels into the recursive nature of consciousness itself.

To open the book is to enter a psychic observatory, where Hilma af Klint maps a blueprint of inner vision, Georgia O’Keeffe distills form into feeling, and Yayoi Kusama installs her Infinity Mirror Room inside the text. Leonora Carrington rides through on the back of a beast, helping the book remember its animal body, while Etel Adnan teaches the sentence its tidal topography to redefine here. Around them flicker Borges, Bachelard, Carson, Cixous, Lispector, Pessoa—facets of a living prism. Ultimately, the book reveals itself to be burning flame and alchemical retort: a device that is also a process, a process that is also a person, transmuting endlessly.

awards

The Book of Embers was selected by Amaranth Borsuk for the 2022 Essay Press Book Prize. It is available for purchase at Essay Press. A stand-alone photo-documentary project based on an excerpt from the book recently appeared in Tupelo Quarterly. Additional excerpts have been published in Witness, A Mouth Holds Many Thing (Fonograf Editions) and Hyena (HEXENTEXTE) to mark the centennial of Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism through a feminist lens.

advance praise

“A brilliant weaver of historical and personal materials, Puig’s encyclopedic mind brings together a lineage of foremothers that includes artists, writers, inventors, scientists, and visionaries. Gathering gorgeous fragments in a layered exploration of the means through which we tell stories and through which stories tell us, Puig asks “which is more supernatural, the book as body or the body as book.” A commonplace book, a confessional, a cartography of family mystery, The Book of Embers glows with the arrival of the reader’s breath.”

– Amaranth Borsuk

“If Jung’s Red Book was a record of man’s descent into the mythic underworld of psyche—masculine, monumental, unfinished—then The Book of Embers is its long-awaited counterpart: a Purple Book, finally written by a woman. Puig dares to go as deep, but through different doors—spiral, art, atom, body. Where Jung drew mandalas, Puig constructs vortexes; where he diagrammed archetypes, she dissolves into them. This is not analysis—it is alchemy, it is gnosis, and the feminine sublime writ large. The Book of Embers doesn’t just chronicle the descent into the unconscious—it remakes it, page by page, voice by voice, self by multiplying self. This is the sacred document of a visionary mind unbound.”

– Buffy Barfoot

“An innovation of both the book object and what one is able to do with fiction… One often reads with hope, or looking for hope. We think, at the end of this I will see, or I will feel or I will imagine, but one of the pressing questions in The Book of Embers which keeps you riveted and takes your breath away is what if there are no ends, no boundaries, no closed spaces?”

– Renee Gladman

design

This project began with white ribbon, tightly wound, and clutched for many years in the hallways of my mind. Because labyrinths persist all around us, its genesis was and still is book as ball of thread reclaimed—for Ariadne, for myself, for unknown women and marginalized people everywhere.

In the process of writing into the ball structure, when expanse and collapse were no longer measurable in yards or feet, the book revealed hologram to be a basin of simultaneity at scale. Not only was the book spherical and unraveling with a secret underbelly, it was also the wayward architecture of labyrinth, history, body. It was so round a text, in fact, as to be a world brimming with water. It was so much a body that its errancy couldn’t keep it from flirting with the void. It was so alive as an organism of history—centerless and yet every point the center—it required different physics.

Once I observed that the hologram knew the book to be more complete, the impulse to produce an artist book rendering fell away. Because process must honor its origins, I leave photos of these earlier permutations of the book printed on ribbon to nest here.