Lance Olsen

• Dec-1990
• / General Fiction
• 

• May-1994
• / General Fiction
• 

So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star? In a future that isn't distant enough, you'll have to sell your soul to MTV just to pick up a guitar. And then they start carving you up, making you over in the mega-media image of glitter and bone.

Poor Ben...

• Sep-1996
• / General Fiction
• 

In the atrocity theme park called America, cannibalism isn't just another ride. Take a journey with the ill-fated Donner Party in nineteenth-century Nevada, the U.S. government illicit-radiation conspirators in twentieth-century Washington State, and...

• 2000
• / Fantasy
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• Jul-2000
• / General Fiction
• 

A tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacleSewing Shut My Eyes is a tour-de-force avant-pop anti-spectacle -- nine darkly satiric out-takes of America tubing. Visions of mid-air synchronicities, robotic cockroaches, cyborg poets and one monstrous HDTV, ...

• Oct-2002
• / General Fiction
• 

Girl Imagined by Chance is a critifictional novel about a couple who find themselves having created a make-believe daughter (and soon a make-believe life to accompany her) in order to appease their friends, family, and the culture of reproductio...

• Apr-2003
• / Horror
• 

HIDEOUS BEAUTIES is a collection of a dozen outrageous fictions, each based on a photograph, painting, sketch, collage, or assemblage by an equally outrageous artist (Hans Bellmer, Ed Kienholz, Joel-Peter Witkin, et alia), that explores the amphibiou...

• Feb-2006
• / General Fiction
• 

Nietzsche’s Kisses is the story of Friedrich Nietzsche’s last mad night on earth. Locked in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar, the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers hovers between dream and wa...

• Feb-2007
• / Literary
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Anxious Pleasures takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting and sad comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surrounded Gregor Samsa during his plight. All the familiar characters are here, including t...

• Nov-2009
• / General Fiction
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Head in Flames is a collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, & quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font & aesthetic/political/existential space...

• Sep-2010
• / General Fiction
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Calendar of Regrets is a wildly inventive and visually rich collage of twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel -- through time, space, narrative, and death.

• Mar-2014
• / General Fiction
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Theories of Forgetting is concerned with how words matter, the materiality of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in the digital age--right from its use of two back covers (one "upside do...

• Apr-2014
• / General Fiction
• 

With fictions from four previous collections, as well as eight new fictions covering the past decade, Olsen has put together a fantastic overview of his lengthy and critically acclaimed history as an author....

• Aug-2014
• / General Fiction
• 

Sharky Marky and the Big Race'is a children's picture book story about a group of sea creatures having an underwater car race. The story encourages children to participate in the adventure by counting numbers to help Sharky Marky come back to w...

• 2015
• / General Fiction
• 

One car-driving shark and his group of adorable undersea friends are up to new tricks in another playful installment in theMom's choice award winning Sharky Marky series, Sharky Marky and the Scavenger Hunt: An Alphabetical Adventure. This time...

• Jul-2015
• / Literary
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You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor -- this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the r...

• Apr-2017
• / Literary
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Dreamlives of Debris is a hybrid retelling of the Theseus and Minotaur myth. Here the Minotaur is a little deformed girl -- she calls herself Debris -- hidden away from public view in the labyrinth beneath Knossos. She possesses the ability to hear t...

• Jan-2020
• / Historical
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Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters―some historic, some invented―crossing paths on the streets of Berlin.

The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Kä...

• Nov-2021
• / Psychological Suspense
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"Olsen’s fascinating experiment achieves heft by the accumulation of personal and collective loss, which makes the nightmarish coda feel eerily plausible. Together, the elegant and heartbreaking set pieces prompt deep reflection on the connections ...

• Feb-2023
• / Literary
• 

A prismatic, imaginative exploration of David Bowie’s last daysAn intricate collage-novel fusing and confusing fact and imagination, Always Crashing in the Same Car is a prismatic exploration of David Bowie through multiple voices and perspectives ...

• Apr-2024
• / General Fiction
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With Lance Olsen’s signature flair, Absolute Away is an innovative narrative triptych, a story of one life reimagined. The first movement tells the story of Edie Metzger, a little Jewish girl who bit Hermann Göring’s lip so hard...