Description
We are proud to present a brilliant talk with Anne de Marcken, who will be visiting us from America to talk about It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, published by the inimitable Fitzcarraldo.
‘Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.’ – Alexandra Kleeman
The heroine of this spare and haunting novel 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 (and loved), and she is determined to get back there at any cost.
Our dead heroine travels across the landscapes of time and of space (heading always west and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest), encountering and losing parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. From a bracing writer of great nerve and verve, this is truly a tale for our dispossessed times, plumbing mortality and how it changes everything – except possibly love.
‘Sad, shocking, funny, prophetic, visceral, and deeply human.’’ – Jeff VanderMeer
Anne de Marcken is a queer interdisciplinary artist and writer living on unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, in the United States. She will be joined in conversation with Rebecca Tamás, a poet, writer, critic, and author of the poetry collection WITCH, and the essay collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman.
Ticket price includes a glass of wine or a soft drink.