Lance Olsen

This book imagines what Nietzsche's last night on earth was like and the many things that must have gone through his mind in those last hours.

"Fiction. You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor--this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam."--Publisher's website.

"Girl Imagined By Chance is a critifictional novel about a couple who, in an unguarded moment, find themselves having created a make-believe daughter (and soon a make-believe life to accompany her) in order to appease their friends, family, and, ultimately, the culture of reproduction."--BOOK JACKET.

"Dreamlives of Debris is a hybrid retelling of the Theseus and Minotaur myth. Here the Minotaur is a little deformed girl-she calls herself Debris-hidden away from public view in the labyrinth beneath Knossos. She possesses the ability to hear the flood of thoughts and see the flood of memories, desires, and futures of others throughout history from Herodotus and Pliny to Borges and Edward Snowden. Her labyrinth takes the form of an impossible liquid architecture bearing no center and hence no discernible perimeter. Dreamlives of Debris explores such impossible architecture as a way of knowing - an extended metaphor for our current sense of lived experience: the feeling, for instance, of being awash in massive, networked data fields that may lead everywhere and nowhere at once. The lyrical narrative takes the form of a collage composed of multiple voices and genres from multiple time periods"--

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--right from its use of two back covers (one ""upside down"" and one ""right-side up"") that allow the reader to choose which of the novel's two narratives to privilege. Theories of Forgetting is a narrative in three parts. The first is the story of Alana, a filmmaker struggling to complete a short documentary about Robert Smithson's famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located.

The crude details of Vladimir Nabokov's story Lolita are well known: The protagonist, Humbert Humbert, marries a widow in order to seduce her provocative teen-aged daughter, Lolita. He succeeds beyond his wildest dreams, becoming in the process not only a child molester (of Lolita) but a murderer (of her lover Quilty). These facts of the story have never been in dispute, but their import has often been the subject of confusion and controversy. Even the book's publication history - it was issued first by a French press known for its pornography in 1955 and finally by the respectable New York firm of Putnam in 1958 - reflects the divided nature of the response to it. Since its publication, critics have categorized Lolita variously as too cerebral or too sensual, too neoclassical or too romantic, too complex or too obvious, too depressing or too witty, too immoral or too didactic. If Lance Olsen would take issue with the "too" in these descriptions, he would also question the "or." In fact, the novel is cerebral and sensual, neoclassical and romantic, complex and obvious, depressing and witty, immoral and didactic. "Like the Roman god Janus," Olsen writes, "Lolita gazes in two directions at once.". In this lively and discerning study of Nabokov's complex tale of sexual obsession and immorality, Olsen clarifies for the reader its many seeming contradictions, brings into focus its many points of view. Its method of characterization, narrative form, themes, tone, use of language, and subtle, yet nearly innumerable literary allusions are all taken up with the idea of laying bare the sophisticated underpinnings of the story. Olsen examines Lolita's place in literary history, explaining how here, too, the novel shows its Janus face as Nabokov acknowledges his debt to modernists such as James Joyce while anticipating the deconstructionist bent of such postmodernists as Donald Barthelme. This meeting of modern and postmodern in a single text marks a crucial moment in the evolution of the novel. His literary venturesomeness notwithstanding, Nabokov himself held fundamentally conservative values that seem at odds with his experimental prose style and his interest in sexual metaphors and attitudes. This paradox, too, contributes to the double-faced nature of the text as the ethical dimensions of the story are complicated by Nabokov's artistic concerns. Olsen's Lolita: A Janus Text uses the Roman god as a guiding image of entry into the world of what remains one of the most elegantly composed and thematically complex novels in the English language.