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Visit Ander Monson's homepage at www.otherelectricities.com.
Winner of the 2007 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares
Like Franklin's discovery of the electricity we do know, Ander Monson's luminous, galvanized book represents a paradigm shift. The frequencies of the Novel have been scrambled and redefined by this elegant experiment. Other Electricities is a new physics of prose, a lyric string theory of charged and sparkling sentences. What a kite! What a key! —Michael Martone
Ander Monson is tuned in to our crackling, chaotic, juiced-up times like no
other young writer I know.Other Electricities is necessary reading. —Robert Olen Butler
Simultaneously published with Monson's collection of poems, Vacationland, Winner of the 4th Annual Tupelo Press First Book Editors' Prize. (Visit www.tupelopress.org for details. Paper edition ISBN: 1-932195-16-5 / $16.95)
Meet "Yr Protagonist": radio amateur, sometime vandal, and "at times, perhaps the author" of Ander Monson's category-defying collection, Other Electricities: "I know about phones. While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency and listen to his voice ... we would give up and go out in the snow with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on others' conversations. There's something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors, debtors...." The cumulative effect of this stunningly original collection seems to work on the reader in the same way—we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Upper Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. There is Crisco Hatfield, the breaker of arms; Bone, dropper of bowling balls off interstate overpasses; The Oracle of Apollo in Tapiola, who sees all; Christer, a pyromaniac collector of pornography who jumps off cliffs for kicks; and most importantly there is Liz, the book's central obsession, "Liz my unknown quotient my lonely roamer," the unknowable girl who crashed through the ice on prom night. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices, and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves, and electricity are influential characters in themselves, affecting an entire community held together by the memories of those they have lost. Uncompromising and relentless, hypnotic and dreamlike, darkly humorous and surprisingly tender, Other Electricities charts a new and strange direction in American fiction.
Ander Monson grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He lived briefly in Saudi Arabia, Iowa, and in the Deep South, where he received his MFA from the University of Alabama. He is the editor of the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including The North American Review, Fence, Field, Gulf Coast, The Bellingham Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and the Mississippi Review, among others. He teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife, Megan, and three cats. Tupelo Press recently published his poetry collection, Vacationland.
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