Nina Shope
Hangings: Three Novellas - now
for a limited time at the special price
of $12, shipping & handling included!
Hangings: Three Novellas
Winner of the 2004 Starcherone Fiction Prize
Chosen as the best manuscript out of 253 submitted to our 2nd annual contest,
Nina Shope's three novellas demonstate stunning range and intensity.
"Nina Shope weaves a suspension of alluring delicacy, strength, and beauty."
Carole Maso
In Hangings, a young woman learns that her mother
is dying and finds herself stalked by nightmarish figures -- the hideously
transformed maiden, Arachne, an upside-down man in a Miro painting, and spiders
that hatch and haunt the text like tumors.
In Urbem imagines an archetypal ancient city,
that city beneath the pavement of all modern cities, in fantastic prose reminiscent
of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
Finally, Hagiographies explores two intense female
friendships, both of which are suddenly shattered, in a wildly inventive narrative
proceeding by means of juxtaposed images rather than sequential events.
"Whether it is busy metastasizing cancer into mythology or invoking into existence
a desire-fraught and maddened harpy of a city, Nina Shope's writing is smart
and carefully layered - yet at the most unexpected moments it is the emotional
equivalent of an open wound. An impressive debut."
Brian Evenson, author of The Wavering Knife, Altmann's Tongue, and others
"The dazzling debut of an immensely talented and big-hearted writer. These
hypnotically beautiful novellas are wildly intelligent, deeply felt, and full
of reminders that 'experimental' writing just means: writing that is trying
with all its heart to account for the many wonders of the world."
George Saunders, author of Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
"The publication of Hangings inaugurates a writer
of literary stature and significance, power and grace. With a seminal style
that defies definition, Nina Shope has delivered a masterwork, both profoundly
beautiful and profoundly disturbing. It is a visionary book that yet never
forgets what makes literature matter. From a mythical city infested with prophets
to quests shaped by stars on the floor, all roads lead to the depths of her
characters' souls. In a world where sophisticated work is often bloodless,
Hangings is a work with heart, Hangings is a work
that matters." Arthur Flowers, author of Mojo
Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman
"Hagiographies ... explores the intensities of
youth, the wildness and weirdness of sex, the incredible complexity of words
not spoken, 'letters' never sent, lives lived only in fragment, expectation,
loneliness, misdirection, and loss. This is a writer of depth and scope."
Kenneth Bernard, judge of the 2004-05 Prize and
author of The Man in the Stretcher
A graduate
of the MFA Creative Writing program at Syracuse University, Nina Shope has
published fiction in Open City, Third
Bed, Fourteen Hills, and Clerestory:
A Brown/RISD Journal of Fine Arts. She lives in Denver, Colorado.