Bøger af Rikki Ducornet

Incarcerated for his subversive connection to the old, living world, a prisoner makes the most of his isolation in this captivating allegorical tale about tyranny, conviction, and the enduring power of imagination. Upon setting out for a morning walk with his knobby stick in hand, a young man is arrested by a robot called the Plotinus and abandoned in a cell where one beam of sunlight beckons through an air duct. Rapping his knuckles against the vent to relay his tale of woe in code, he recalls his lost love and their groupâEUR(TM)s forbidden activities; his readings in philosophy and the sciences; and sweet memories of freedomâEUR(TM)s small pleasures. As the captive confronts his increasingly dire circumstances with rigorous optimism, the appearance of fantastical visitors and miraculous objects in his cell further blurs the line between hallucination and dystopian reality. Told with uncanny warmth and intellectual brio, The Plotinus is Rikki DucornetâEUR(TM)s most unforgettable story yet.

From the singularly inventive mind of Rikki Ducornet, Trafik is a buoyant voyage through outer space and inner longing, transposing human experiences of passion, loss, and identity into a post-Earth universe. Quiver, a mostly-human astronaut, takes refuge from the monotony of harvesting minerals on remote asteroids by running through a virtual reality called the Lights, chasing visions of an elusive red-haired beauty. Her high-strung robot partner, Mic, pilots their Wobble and entertains himself by surfing records of the obliterated planet Earth stored on his Swift Wheel for Al Pacino trivia, recipes for reconstituted sushi, and high fashion trends. But when an accident destroys their cargo, Quiver and Mic go rogue, setting off on a madcap journey through outer space toward an idyllic destination: the planet Trafik.

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two men: a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla, the young and free-spirited native woman who has become the love of his life. Meanwhile, his demented son Septimus is raised by his mother in prewar Europe, seething with hatred of the father who abandoned him. He rises to power in Nazi-occupied France, where he goes mad in an obsessive pursuit of racial purity.Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans."Linguistically explosive and socially relevant, [her] works are solid evidence that Rikki Ducornet is one of the most interesting writers around ... We are living in an age of intellectual and emotional starvation that is largely without spirituality, cynical about social change and disconnected from the natural world. We need writers to look at these difficult issues in a sophisticated manner. Ducornet has done this. She is the mirror of our innermost selves. And she gives us back to ourselves—despairing , hopeful, active, contemplative, fractured but surviving, playful, even happy sometimes, and always whole ... Ducornet's villains have the best lines ... one only has to think of Hitler or PolPot or any of our assorted tyrants to know that Ducornet's figures are ... taken from life."—The Nation"Entering Fire displays a cheerfully gruesome audacity and an imagination both lively and bizarre."—The New York Times"Entering Fire is about the metaphoric and potentially evil properties of language; it is about origins and motives of myth-making. This is a novel of ideas (often strange ideas) that is sustained throughout by brilliant writing."—London Sunday Times"Far from being an escapist fantasy, Entering Fire takes on some of the biggest issues of the 20th century … For sheer power, inventiveness and verbal density, [it] is the best read I've come across for a long time."—The Observer"A drastically beautiful comic writer who stitches sentences together as if Proust had gone into partnership with Lenny Bruce."—City Limits" … imaginative and unbridled fantasy."—Le Monde" … an imagination and a style as captivating as it is devastating."—Lire"Unlike anything you've ever read before."—L'ExpressRikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans.

With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous and the marvelous—as transmuted in the alembic of Rikki Ducornet's open-hearted vision—in literature, art and film. For her, excess anomaly, and heterodoxy entice the imagining mind to embrace "otherness," enlarge the world and regenerate Eden.

A collection of mesmeric lyrical poems.

Twelve startlingly original stories about erotic desire. Each story focuses on a pivotal erotic moment in the lives of men and women who narrate them. Only a few are overtly sexual in content, but each explores the many strange reverberations that occur when desire is present, whether acted upon or kept inside.

This year Rikki Ducornet is being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her beloved work as a novelist and essayist, but perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modernday fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction. This landmark collection of new stories is generously illustrated by T. Motley, whose gritty, fantastical cartooning explores the same post-magical realism that has been the subject of Ducornet's distinguished career.