Girl Imagined by Chance bookcover

Girl Imagined by Chance

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Description

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 reproduction. Structured around twelve photographs from a single roll of film, the book explores the nature of photography and the questions that nature raises about the notions of the simulated and the real, the media-ization of consciouness, originality, self construction, and the way we all continually fashion our faces into masks for the next shot. At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. The prevailing metaphor and structural device of photograpy examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The seemigly stable and fixed individual past turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future. The body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces.

Product Details

PublisherF2c
Publish DateSeptember 25, 2002
Pages328
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781573661034
Dimensions8.5 X 5.5 X 0.8 inches | 0.9 pounds
BISAC Categories: Popular Fiction

About the Author

Lance Olsen is author of more than a dozen works of and about innovative fiction, including the speculative fiction, Tonguing the Zeitgeist(Permeable Press, 1994), finalist for the Philip K. Dick award, the short story collection Sewing Shut My Eyes (FC2, 2000) and, most recently, the novel Freaknest (Wordcraft, 2000). A Pushcart Prize recipient, he has published over 150 short stories, essays, and reviews in various journals and anthologies including Fiction International, The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Hudson Review, and Village Voice. He lives corporeally in central Idaho and digitally at www.cafezeitgeist.com

Reviews

"Lance Olsen has composed a spare parable of representation and self, the loss of the real and the reality of loss. Girl Imagined by Chance is smart and moving and elegant, its seemingly offhand scenes as effortlessly poignant as a handful of old snapshots." --Shelley Jackson, author of Patchwork Girl

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