Brian Evenson

In 1692 when a plague of accusations descends on Salem Village in Massachusetts and "witch fever" erupts, fourteen-year-old Lidda, who has begun to experience visions and hear voices, tries to expose the lies of the witch trials without being hanged as a witch herself. Includes author's notes about the Salem Witch Trials and bipolar disease.

There are times when the sources of an imaginative act, of the specific conditions of mood and temperament we believe assemble it, seem as much to the point as the thing itself, as the creation - in this case, the stories and the novella - that are their result. Amazingly, or perhaps expectably, Brian Evenson is a devout Mormon, an unequivocal believer, a bishop in the Church. In this vein, it seems necessary to say that Evenson is married, that he is the father of two little girls, and that he conducts classes as a faculty member at Brigham Young University. In other words, Evenson appears, in every particular, to be the very destroyer of what - in this most shocking book - he is instead the maker of. It could be claimed that Evenson's unimprovable devotion to The Book of Mormon, his text of perfect revelation, invoked in him something infernally human - the artist, never first but forever a figure made visible, made audible, only by being elsewhere, only by being in solitude. Altmann's Tongue is a theater of solitudes. Its moods are chilling, its temperament is cold, and the episodes that construe its twenty-five short fictions and the long fiction, The Sanza Affair, are, in every aspect, brutal - as if brutality was the medium of our relations with one another and the instrument of our will to record the ultimate expression of ourselves. In Evenson's world, all moral and all social categories dissolve. Only diction and syntax count - and they count only insofar as they might succeed in freeing utterance to enact itself at its most cruel. For reasons the language knows, there are events - bystanders slain for passing along wrong directions to motorists in leisurely pursuit of dark errands, fathers interring children without bothering to walk a little distance to inform the mothers, mothers seeking to reintroduce sons to the incomparable solace of the maternal fold - that issue out of certain densities of feeling, out of certain intensities of action. It may be that a prefix or a suffix sets everything in motion - and that all fate is lingual and, in these terms, logical. Meanwhile, we have a young American writer and his fierce debut. What he has dared to set down is strange, very strange - and very strangely fascinating.

"The Warren is a tense, thoughtful exploration of a battle for survival between two beings with competing claims to humanity."--Publisher's website.

"In his entry in Ig's Bookmarked series, award-winning author Brian Evenson offers his unique and personal take on this classic Carver collection. In addition to discussing his longstanding appreciation for Caver's work, Evenson also delves into his relationship with Gordon Lish, Caver's famous editor, who also edited Evenson's debut story collections. Evenson uses this relationship as a springboard to contemplate not only the role of Lish on Caver's writing, but the importance and power of the editor on the authorial process..."--Back cover.