Staff Pick
This little story has an almost old-fashioned feel to it, as it explores themes of belonging, home, and acceptance, but also mental illness, family dysfunction, abandonment and obsession. Alone, Stub manages to infiltrate a nearby college campus and begins to live as a student, but is constantly aware of his "other" status. When presented with the reality of a surrogate home, he struggles to accept it. Amid his confusion, he mistakes dark clouds of obsession for comfort. Beautifully done, Brightfellow is a tiny, but surprisingly complex, gem. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A voluptuous novel of imposture, emotional deformity, feral children, and the dangers of taking in that little boy lost.
Review
"It is Rikki Ducornet’s magic to be able to coax an entire universe—'restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence'—out of the modest and often grim contours of one man’s life. It’s one man, Brightfellow, whose job it is to simultaneously inhabit and invent and contain and protect and destroy this place of copperheads and academics, bad mothers and islands, a savant scholar and a little girl. He also knows how to break our hearts and fan the fires of hope." Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex
Review
"Linguistically explosive...one of the most interesting American writers around." The Nation
Review
"Bursting with vivid imagery, beautiful language, heartbreaking characters, and the striking perspective of an emotionally stunted man in a carefully controlled society, Ducornet’s tale is unique and captivating." Booklist
Review
"A portrait of a surreal community that defies easy categorization. Like poetry, the novel’s central aims are to revel in language and investigate the inner lives of characters who see a world that is more numinous (to borrow a word of Stub’s) than the people around them can recognize. This makes Ducornet’s choice to focus on anthropologists and young children satisfyingly apt....An endless delight at the sentence level…" Kirkus
Review
"Ducornet has written the oddest of varsity novels, one that anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Praise for Rikki Ducornet: "A novelist whose vocabulary sweats with a kind of lyrical heat." --New York Times
"Ducornet--surrealist, absurdist, pure anarchist at times--is one of our most accomplished writers, adept at seizing on the perfect details and writing with emotion and cool detachment simultaneously. I love her style because it is penetrating and precise but also sensual without being overwrought. You experience a Ducornet novel with all of your senses." --Jeff VanderMeer
"Linguistically explosive. . . . One of the most interesting American writers around." --The Nation
"Ducornet celebrates the playful and rebellious nature of art, and the anarchic ability of the imagination to subvert physical limitations." --Times Literary Supplement
A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails, and homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, the pie that disappeared off the cooling rack. Then Stub meets Billy, who takes him in, and Asthma, who enchants him, and all is found, then lost. A fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection, and emotional deformity.
An artist and writer, Rikki Ducornet has illustrated books by Robert Coover, Jorge Luis Borges, Forrest Gander, and Joanna Howard. Her paintings have been exhibited widely, including, most recently, at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Salvador Allende Museum in Santiago, Chile.
Synopsis
A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails, and homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, the pie that disappeared off the cooling rack. Then Stub meets Billy, who takes him in, and Asthma, who enchants him, and all is found, then lost. A fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection, and the many ways we are both visible and invisible to one another.
About the Author
The author of eight previous novels as well as collections of short stories, essays, and poems, Rikki Ducornet has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a two-time honoree of the Lannan Foundation, and is the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
Rikki Ducornet on PowellsBooks.Blog
Brightfellow is the second novel in a trilogy devoted to betrayal. (
Netsuke is the first). If not exactly autobiographical, it takes place within an extended revery of the Bard College campus where I grew up and where my father taught Social Philosophy. Born in Havana, his intellectual life was expansive...
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