It Lasts Forever and Then It's over

Autorentext

Anne de Marcken is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and the founding editor and publisher of the small alternative press, The 3rd Thing. She is author of the novel It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over and the lyric novella The Accident: An Account. Her writing has been featured in Best New American Voices, Brick, Ploughshares, Narrative, Elastic, on NPR and elsewhere, garnering numerous awards including The Novel Prize, The Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize, and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer Award. She lives with her spouse, fellow artist M Freeman, at the southern tip of the Salish Sea in Washington State.

Klappentext

CO-WINNER OF THE NOVEL PRIZE

WINNER OF THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE

WINNER OF THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD

WINNER OF A PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD

This third perspective on myself is disconcerting.

The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known-where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.

A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader's mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader's imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

Zusammenfassung
Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it - how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?