Lia Swope Mitchell's Blog
November 10, 2024
KREE by Manuela Draeger: Reviews!
Reviews have been coming in for KREE, and I thought it would be nice to share a few here.
First, from Jake Casella Brookins at Locus Magazine: "besides Kree’s graphically violent action scenes, it is loaded with images of corpses piled deep in pits and trenches. [...] But there’s a kind of bizarro exuberance to Kree that somehow keeps it from being a downer"
From Brendan Tynan Buck for Newcity Chicago: "Picking up a book like “Kree,” I have that distinct feeling of the ice sheets closing in, having strayed too far from home."
From Eileen Gonzalez at Foreword Reviews: "The book’s nonlinear storytelling emphasizes Kree’s sense of displacement while revealing piecemeal her past, present, and future. Bizarre imagery melds with the stark realities of oppression to create a harrowing, inescapable atmosphere. [...] Kree is a dark, mind-bending novel about what humanity is left with once they have nothing to remember or to fight for."
KREE is available from University of Minnesota Press.
First, from Jake Casella Brookins at Locus Magazine: "besides Kree’s graphically violent action scenes, it is loaded with images of corpses piled deep in pits and trenches. [...] But there’s a kind of bizarro exuberance to Kree that somehow keeps it from being a downer"
From Brendan Tynan Buck for Newcity Chicago: "Picking up a book like “Kree,” I have that distinct feeling of the ice sheets closing in, having strayed too far from home."
From Eileen Gonzalez at Foreword Reviews: "The book’s nonlinear storytelling emphasizes Kree’s sense of displacement while revealing piecemeal her past, present, and future. Bizarre imagery melds with the stark realities of oppression to create a harrowing, inescapable atmosphere. [...] Kree is a dark, mind-bending novel about what humanity is left with once they have nothing to remember or to fight for."
KREE is available from University of Minnesota Press.
July 12, 2024
Volodine's "Shaggå of the painfully infinite sky" now available online
Fans and connoisseurs of post-exoticism may be interested to read my translation of Antoine Volodine's "Shaggå of the painfully infinite sky," an excerpt from Nos Animaux préférés," is available to read online at The Baffler.
February 3, 2021
SOLO VIOLA by Antoine Volodine
Hey Goodreaders! I'm pleased to inform you that SOLO VIOLA, my translation of Antoine Volodine's ALTO SOLO, will be released in May and is currently available for pre-order. Please check it out! It has a beautiful cover by Michel Vrana.
Solo Viola: A Post-Exotic Novel
Solo Viola: A Post-Exotic Novel
September 4, 2018
Survival of the Fireflies, out now!
Survival of the Fireflies by Georges Didi-Huberman is now available for purchase! I am thrilled and grateful that I had the opportunity to translate this very timely reflection on power, propaganda, and the survival of individual experience and expression in spite of everything. What’s in it, you ask? Well, here’s a brief summary, chapter by chapter:
Chapter 1: HELLS? Dante imagined Paradise as a great, glorious light, and Hell as a space of small, wandering flashes. But Pier Paolo Pasolini inverts this to create a metaphor for totalitarian power: the dictator blinds with fierce spotlights, while the people glimmer in darkness, like fireflies.
Chapter 2: SURVIVALS. Are the fireflies lost, as Pasolini believed? Perhaps we can understand them as as “minor lights”: deterritorialized, political, collective. Like Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, their glimmer is only visible from certain positions—yet they survive, in spite of all.
Chapter 3: APOCALYPSES? In Giorgio Agamben’s apocalyptic vision of our contemporary world, “experience has fallen.” Transcendence requires redemption. Yet survivals need neither destruction nor redemption. Truth glimmers in images, not beyond the horizon of final revelation.
Chapter 4: PEOPLES. The fierce light of power overwhelms the smaller flashes of fireflies, just as, in Agamben, totalitarianism reduces the power of peoples. Yet Benjamin’s philosophical archaeology imagines dialectical counterforces and the “tradition of the oppressed.”
Chapter 5: DESTRUCTIONS? What we perceive depends on where we look: do we focus on the immense light of the distant horizon? Or on the faint flashes of images closeby? The image offers us recourse from the decline of experience, but it’s up to us to seek out fireflies.
Chapter 6: IMAGES. Firefly-knowledge, firefly-words, and firefly-images—like those of Charlotte Beradt, Georges Bataille, and Laura Waddington—stand as testimony and prophecy, transmitted through darkness and time, and become flashes for others. Even if it may be reduced to clandestine moments and flashes in the night, experience can never be destroyed.
In a time when many of us (including yours truly) are so entranced with the multiple and ubiquitous lights of screens, which transmit both spectacle and individual expression in the same feed, here is a book that asks us to look, instead, into darkness, in hopes of finding fireflies. I really think it’s worth a read. If you’re interested, you can buy it here.
Chapter 1: HELLS? Dante imagined Paradise as a great, glorious light, and Hell as a space of small, wandering flashes. But Pier Paolo Pasolini inverts this to create a metaphor for totalitarian power: the dictator blinds with fierce spotlights, while the people glimmer in darkness, like fireflies.
Chapter 2: SURVIVALS. Are the fireflies lost, as Pasolini believed? Perhaps we can understand them as as “minor lights”: deterritorialized, political, collective. Like Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, their glimmer is only visible from certain positions—yet they survive, in spite of all.
Chapter 3: APOCALYPSES? In Giorgio Agamben’s apocalyptic vision of our contemporary world, “experience has fallen.” Transcendence requires redemption. Yet survivals need neither destruction nor redemption. Truth glimmers in images, not beyond the horizon of final revelation.
Chapter 4: PEOPLES. The fierce light of power overwhelms the smaller flashes of fireflies, just as, in Agamben, totalitarianism reduces the power of peoples. Yet Benjamin’s philosophical archaeology imagines dialectical counterforces and the “tradition of the oppressed.”
Chapter 5: DESTRUCTIONS? What we perceive depends on where we look: do we focus on the immense light of the distant horizon? Or on the faint flashes of images closeby? The image offers us recourse from the decline of experience, but it’s up to us to seek out fireflies.
Chapter 6: IMAGES. Firefly-knowledge, firefly-words, and firefly-images—like those of Charlotte Beradt, Georges Bataille, and Laura Waddington—stand as testimony and prophecy, transmitted through darkness and time, and become flashes for others. Even if it may be reduced to clandestine moments and flashes in the night, experience can never be destroyed.
In a time when many of us (including yours truly) are so entranced with the multiple and ubiquitous lights of screens, which transmit both spectacle and individual expression in the same feed, here is a book that asks us to look, instead, into darkness, in hopes of finding fireflies. I really think it’s worth a read. If you’re interested, you can buy it here.
August 16, 2018
Forthcoming: Survival of the Fireflies by Georges Didi-Huberman
Just wanted to note here that my translation of Georges Didi-Huberman's Survival of the Fireflies is coming out in just a few weeks!
Here's part of the blurb:
In this book, through his readings of Dante, Pasolini, Walter Benjamin, and others, Georges Didi-Huberman seeks again to understand the strange, minor light of fireflies, the signals of small beings in search of love [...] Their flickering presence serves as a counterforce to the blinding sovereign power that Giorgio Agamben calls The Kingdom and the Glory, that artificial brilliance that once surrounded dictators and today emanates from every screen. In this timely reflection, much needed in our time of excessive light, Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies offers a humble yet powerful image of individual hope and desire: the firefly-image.
The release date is September 4th, but it's available for pre-order from Amazon now.
Here's part of the blurb:
In this book, through his readings of Dante, Pasolini, Walter Benjamin, and others, Georges Didi-Huberman seeks again to understand the strange, minor light of fireflies, the signals of small beings in search of love [...] Their flickering presence serves as a counterforce to the blinding sovereign power that Giorgio Agamben calls The Kingdom and the Glory, that artificial brilliance that once surrounded dictators and today emanates from every screen. In this timely reflection, much needed in our time of excessive light, Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies offers a humble yet powerful image of individual hope and desire: the firefly-image.
The release date is September 4th, but it's available for pre-order from Amazon now.
January 16, 2017
2016 wrap up!
I have been neglecting this blog for over a year now, and will probably continue to do so. If you want more frequent information about my various movements, check out my website, as I don't neglect it quite so shamefully.
Here's a list of my recent publications, for anyone interested:
"Mag, the Habitat and We." Apex Magazine #92, January 2017.
"Skills to Keep the Devil in His Place." Shimmer Magazine #34, November 2016.
"RAT KING." Podcast, read by Rish Outland. Pseudopod #501, July 29, 2016
"Plural." Podcast/reprint, read by Amanda Ching. Escape Pod #527, April 17, 2016.
"Plantation | Springtime." Terraform, April 14, 2016.
Happy 2017, everyone! Let's just remember, one person's utopia is another person's dystopia.
Here's a list of my recent publications, for anyone interested:
"Mag, the Habitat and We." Apex Magazine #92, January 2017.
"Skills to Keep the Devil in His Place." Shimmer Magazine #34, November 2016.
"RAT KING." Podcast, read by Rish Outland. Pseudopod #501, July 29, 2016
"Plural." Podcast/reprint, read by Amanda Ching. Escape Pod #527, April 17, 2016.
"Plantation | Springtime." Terraform, April 14, 2016.
Happy 2017, everyone! Let's just remember, one person's utopia is another person's dystopia.
November 27, 2015
Out now! Blurring the Line
Hey everybody! Blurring the Line is an anthology of horror that plays along the lines of reality and surreality, edited by Marty Young and published by Cohesion Press. My story "Empty Cars" is included. Snap it up, if it sounds like something you'd enjoy.
Blurring the Line
Blurring the Line
April 7, 2015
Slow, in Apex 71
Gentle readers of this blog will note I have a new publication listed above! Yes indeed, my story "Slow" is included in the April 2015 issue of Apex Magazine. Many thanks to the editors. If anyone would like to read, "Slow" is available if you click this clicky-thing here. Thanks as always for reading.
March 9, 2015
In Cosmos Magazine: Plural
Hey readereaux and readerettes, I've got a new story out on the internet today. It is entitled "Plural" and it is the fiction section of the February/March issue of Cosmos Magazine. Have a look if you are so inclined.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/the-future...
https://cosmosmagazine.com/the-future...
