The Book of Embers

project details

The Book of Embers is a multidimensional novel that blurs the line of narrative, essay, literary criticism, art history, biography and autobiography as it chronicles the musings of a modern-day Ariadne.

In Greek mythology, Ariadne presided as Mistress of the Labyrinth—her legendary ball of thread guiding Theseus in his endeavor to kill the dreaded Minotaur. At once an unfurling of the cosmos alongside one woman’s consciousness, the novel is likewise an ode to the imagination’s ever-unfolding terrain. The book’s syncretic texture engages the work of Clarice Lispector, Anne Carson, Etel Adnan, Maggie Nelson, Hélène Cixous, Isabelle Eberhardt, Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, Yayoi Kusama, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gaston Bachelard, Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, and José Saramago, among others.

design

The Book of Embers exists in two fully-dialoguing formats: a traditional book object as well as an artist book rendering that will be mass-produced. The formal implications of the traditional book object are equally as pressing as those that unravel from over 100 meters of the artist book rendering.

awards

The Book of Embers was selected by Amaranth Borsuk for the 2022 Essay Press Book Prize. It will be published as traditional book object by Essay Press in Fall 2025 in conjunction with its release as an artist book rendering. A stand-alone photo-documentary project based on an excerpt from the book recently appeared in Tupelo Quarterly. Additional excerpts have been in A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Literary Collection by Fonograf Editions and Hyena by HEXENTEXTE to mark the centennial of Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism through a feminist lens.

advance praise

“The Book of Embers is an innovation of both the book object and of what one is able to do with fiction…it enacts and at the same time symbolizes the most intimate experience of reading, following the line, the progression of language, out of an unknown interior space into the world of our eyes and bodies. But in this case, not to make a page, but rather something that makes a soft pile on the floor, that collapses and wraps around itself.

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