"This ambitious novel juxtaposes historical tragedies with a futuristic frame. ... While these storylines can be emotionally devastating on the page (particularly the Challenger subplot), the skill with which Olsen links them together keeps things moving at an impressive pace. Readers willing to immerse themselves in this challenging novel will be left with plenty to discuss afterward."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Olsen's fascinating experiment achieves heft by the accumulation of personal and collective loss, which makes the nightmarish coda feel eerily plausible. Together, the elegant and heartbreaking set pieces prompt deep reflection on the connections between minds and bodies, and on where both are ultimately headed."
-Publishers Weekly (starred) "Nimble prose captures the book's diverse moods and tones, from a famous murderer's twisted inner ramblings to a Japanese math teacher's minimalist, poetic observations about life as the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit. ...
Skin Elegies is a most unusual and compelling novel about the diversity and necessity of human connection."
-Foreword Reviews (starred) "I can't help but adore Olsen's willingness to rescue text from the screen and set it free on the page."
-Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves "Cinching bands of filmic narrative tighten. You must keep reading
Skin Elegies, but why? Suspense. Meanwhile, take in the novel's rhythms, textual harmonics, and notion of human meaning lost/gained/lost in the multiverse-these also are its propellants. Its friable core is story. Lance Olsen's newest work is an amazing literary experiment."
-Stacey Levine, author of The Girl with Brown Fur, Frances Johnson, and My Horse and Other Stories "Skin Elegies is an enormously subtle and complex feat of the imagination, blending historical and contemporary artifacts and memories within a much larger and vaguely conspiratorial context fitting for some its late sixties setting. Shades of Pynchon and DeLillo and all Lance Olsen in this important new book."
-Joseph Salvatore, author of To Assume a Pleasing Shape "Not since the revolutionary novels of Rudy Wurlitzer in the 1960s and 1970s have I encountered such a stunningly ambitious and astonishing narrative bricolage as Lance Olsen's
Skin Elegies. This meaty metanovel takes an esthetically and judiciously selected handful of our most vital history from 1945 to a prescient 2072, atomizes and digitizes it, then hits the SHUFFLE button before replaying the events through a set of hallucinogenic filters that Instagram would kill for. The effect is like riding a rollercoaster through a set of stargates, looping in an out of a multiverse composed of unforgettable characters and scintillant prose-poems. As fresh as the unfolding new decade, yet as eternal as the oneiric oracles of Tiresias, this book rebuilds our shared past and channels our mutual futures."
–Paul Di Filippo, author of Ribofunk, Cosmocopia, The Mezcal Crack-up, and others "Reading
Skin Elegies feels like watching your mind explode, translating and transfiguring its limitless possibilities into a brilliant galaxy all around and piercingly inside you. Memories spark and intensify, each flare fueled by compassion, invention, despair, horror. We are not ourselves, alone. Lance Olsen's spectacularly innovative novel is a song of exaltation for the limitlessness of our minds-and a lament for limits of our bodies."
-Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River and The 7th Man "The curiously soulful mosaic of
Skin Elegies's stories of connections missed, broken, catastrophic, and impossible is a reminder that, for all that has been and will be made of Lance Olsen's architectonic innovations, his novels are never othe
