Phosphor in Dreamland

Rikki Ducornet author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press

Published:10th Aug '23

Should be back in stock very soon

Phosphor in Dreamland cover

  • Serial rights targeting Harper’s, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Granta

  • Print and digital publicity targeting the New Yorker, Paris Review, NPR, New York Times, Bookforum, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, LARB, Literary Hub

  • Campaign emphasizing Dalkey Archive Essentials series

  • New introduction from recognized author/critic

  • Marketing highlighting author’s past praise

  • Targeted bookseller mailing

  • Virtual and in-person events featuring author

  • Promotion on publisher’s website and social media; promotion via e-newsletters to booksellers, reviewers

Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet’s dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island’s seventeenth-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island’s exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza. The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet’s novel that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was described by one reviewer as “Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll.” Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.

“Rikki Ducornet’s new novel is a delicious, spellbinding masterpiece. The exercise of her extravagant imaginative powers is rigorous, the richness of her writing concentrated to trenchant effect, and her enchanting narrative conducted with great intensity and seriousness. Phosphor’s bewildering, bewildered career deserves a constellation in the firmament of literary heroes.”—Harry Mathews

“Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.” —Joanna Scott

“Rikki Ducornet is imagination's emissary to this mundane world.” —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books

“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope.” —The New York Times

“Linguistically explosive. . . . One of the most interesting American writers around.” —The Nation

ISBN: 9781628974430

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

192 pages