Uncompromising, hypnotic and darkly humorous, Other Electricities
charts a new and strange direction in American fiction.
"Like Franklin's discovery of the electricity we do know, Monson's
luminous, galvanized book represents a paradigm shift. The frequencies
of the novel have been scrambled and redefined by this elegant
experiment. Other Electricities is a new physics of prose, a lyric
string theory of charged and sparkling sentences. What a kite! What a
key!"--Michael Martone
"Monson is tuned in to our crackling, chaotic, juiced-up times like no
other young writer I know. Other Electricities is necessary
reading."--Robert Olen Butler
Meet "Yr Protagonist" radio amateur, sometime vandal and "at times,
perhaps the author" of Monson's category-defying collection:
I know about phones. While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something
to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency
and listen to his voice . . . we would give up and go out in the snow
with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on
others' conversations. There's something nearly sexual about this,
hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins,
psychics, pastors. . . .
The cumulative effect of this stunningly original collection seems to
work on the reader in the same way--we follow glimpses of dispossessed
lives in the snow-buried reaches of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, where
nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear
forever. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short
stories, lists, indices and radio schematics, Monson presents a world
where weather, landscape, radio waves and electricity are characters in
themselves, affecting a community held together by the memories of those
they have lost.
Ander Monson is the editor of DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press.
He teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Michigan.
Tupelo Press recently published his poetry collection, Elegies for
Descent and Dreams of Weather.
