The Revisionist

Fiction. The title character of THE REVISIONIST conducts covert surveillance on a city whose inhabitants are subject to uncanny transformations as a result of catastrophic weather, political corruption, invasive technologies and environmental degradation. Hired to spin, or "revise," the facts, the revisionist's perceptions in turn become detached and distorted--inevitably unreliable yet all the same, revealing. This civil scientist of a narrator sardonically observes a distressed landscape inhabited by mutant children, a seeing-eye dog, a centenarian with iguanas and constellations beneath her dress, brooding frigate birds, insurance love clones, a terrorist curator, a private investigator, and a little girl who's discovered the world's largest conch. "THE REVISIONIST is at once a beautifully simple fable and a wonderfully lyrical apocalyptic tale"--Brian Evenson.

“Caught somewhere in that nexus of living, observing and manipulating from which our current American malaise most convincingly reveals itself, the conflicted narrator of Miranda Mellis’s taut story telescopulates to capture and possess a variety of lives from a distance. The Revisionist is at once a beautifully simple fable and a wonderfully lyrical apocalyptic tale. Though its motion seems at first Brownian, it manages almost because of this to get to where few books ever manage to go.”

—Brian Evenson

“There's an uncanny lightness about Miranda Mellis's gliding techno-novella. It's slow and glimmery like steam punk—and wise about gender too. She's right up there (for me) with Bob Dylan, folk art, anime and all the kind and great animals and plants of the world. I love this book so much.”

—Eileen Myles

“Like a panopticon of virtual dystopia, The Revisionist allows characters which seem human only by dint of a certain nostalgia. A world is wiped away, but leaves a smudge on the lens. This is the eye’s response to the everyday workings of what no longer quite works. A jarring and beautiful book.”

—Thalia Field