Bøker av Lance Olsen

For decades, Lance Olsen has been a wellspring of literary innovation, sophistication, and elan. With more than thirty books to his name, he consistently pushes the limits of narrative and aspires for the New. Shrapnel brings together some of Olsen's most compelling nonfiction from the twenty-first century. In this collection of essays and interviews, he discusses topics ranging from the philosophy of contemporary writing and the corporatization of the literary scene to entropology, creative disjunction, autrebiography, media culture, and identity politics, with insights into the lives and writings of fellow stylists like Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Donald Barthelme, Steve Tomasula, Kathy Acker, and many others. All this is supplemented by reflections on his own craft and worldly experiences. Intuitive, edifying, and earnest, Shrapnel reveals Olsen's breadth of knowledge while (re)establishing him as one of the few living authors invested in preserving the increasingly lost art of literature.

With Lance Olsen’s signature flair, Absolute Away is an innovative narrative triptych, a story of one life reimagined. The first movement tells the story of Edie Metzger, a little Jewish girl who bit Hermann Göring’s lip so hard it bled at a Nazi book-burning rally in 1933. In the second, in 1956, grown Edie is the passenger clinging to the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, moments before it plunges off the road. In the third, the narrative embarks into an ever-unspooling universe of Edies that might have lived—Edie’s gender, past, and consciousness flying forever farther apart.Absolute Away is a novel about travel in its largest sense—about the self, the past, the future, aging, ideas, relationships, our own mortal being(s) as transitive verbs, and how what and who we are connects to everything else.

"Always Crashing in the Same Car by Lance Olsen is a novel that explores the last months of David Bowie's life through multiple voices and perspectives-the protean musician himself, an academic trying to compose a critical monograph about him, friends, lovers, musicologists, and others in Bowie's orbit"--

Lance Olsen's discerning critique was the first extended study ever published on the work of William Gibson, whose mindbending science fiction novel, Neuromancer (1984), created the subgenre of Cyberpunk, and became the first novel to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards for best SF novel of the year. Olsen covers Gibson's major early works, including Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Complete with bibliography, notes, and index.

A selection of short stories set in a future where America has become a channel-surfing nation, where pain has become home theatre and, with so many channels, watching TV beats sex.

Theories of Forgetting is concerned with how words matter, the materiality of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in the digital age.

A lyrical novel about the way fictions can take over our lives. It tells the story of an unnamed cyber-journalist and his photographer-wife, Reyla, who, childless and approaching middle age, move to a small Idaho town. Then Genia enters the world, a baby girl conceived only in imagination.

Presents a portrait of the Nietzsches we know and the Nietzsches we don't, the one who killed off God, unmoored language from the things to which it refers, and invented the notions of the Ubermensch and Eternal Recurrence. This book offers an experience of Nietzsche's criti-fictional imagination, internal dividedness, and existential alienation.

This fascinating study of literary theory is the first work of its kind to examine the intersection of fantasy and postmodernism, and to analyze contemporary fantasy writers comparatively. After carefully developing working definitions of postmodernism and fantasy, the author goes on to analyze works by various postmodernist fantasy writers.