10: 01

Walter Benjamin envisioned the underground Paris Arcades as the quintessential 19th century industrial dream space. In 10:01 Lance Olsen provides us with the Millennial version: the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, large enough to contain seven Yankee Stadiums. Each page headlines a different character or set of characters randomly flung together in a movie theater there in mid-afternoon. They interface (often freakishly) with each other; with the Mall's blandishments; with the images on the screen; with their own fantasies. At the climax the theater and its inhabitants suddenly implode, perhaps out of the ultimate logic of late industrial capitalism. Or they don't implode but are sucked irresistibly into the black hole of American make-believe. Olsen has written a cunningly original docufiction of the American psyche post-9/11 and perennial.

"A fine, penetrating novel." Alvin Greenberg

"Olsen has written a cunningly original docufiction of the American psyche post-9/11 and perennial." Harold Jaffe

"[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 projector beam." Steve Tomasula

A novel about what goes through the heads of a few dozen people one winter midafternoon in a movie theater in the Mall of America the last ten minutes and one second before the feature begins.

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. Be sure to check out Lance Olsen's other titles at SPD, including SEWING SHUT MY EYES.

Novelist and critic Lance Olsen has written more than a dozen books of or about postmodern fiction.