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, Djuna Barnes, Etel Adnan, Maggie Nelson, Hélène Cixous, Isabelle Eberhardt, Toyen, Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, Yayoi Kusama, Frida Kahlo, 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. The reader of the traditional book object encounters an inquiry into a recto/verso universe and its emergent interior text. Text appears on the recto side of the page only throughout most of the book until it doesn’t. The same holds in the ball structure where interior text is printed on the underside of the ribbon.

The physical process by which the reader undertakes an interactive excursion into The Book of Embers embodies a deeper significance that speaks to the very nature of reading and writing. We read by allowing a line of language to entice us onward. Bound to the greater literary whole, this linear lingual causeway signals our means of passage and descent. Yet, the reader’s unraveling of the ribbon simultaneously enacts the process of writing—that wayward grappling, forever attempting to draw forth language unable to see where it might lead—in many ways, making the reader the writer in the end.

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. A section of the book was published in A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Literary Collection by Fonograf Editions that collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists. Additional excerpts are forthcoming in Hyena (Fall 2024) 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