Anne de Marcken lives in the United States on unceded land of the Coast Salish people. She is the founding editor and publisher of The 3rd Thing.
‘[A] soul-stirringly expansive novel, It Lasts Forever and
Then It’s Over, classic dramatic structures – introduction, rise,
climax, fall, resolution – are distended, and linger after the
curtains close.… By resisting endings, de Marcken’s deeply
imaginative novel reflects that world – our collective story.’
— Kate Simpson, Telegraph
‘It is simply glorious. Zombie existence has its poetics; it
critiques its own definitions…. [And] these zombies genuinely try
to communicate with one another: their conversations are relayed
with an almost Beckettian skill, and are very funny – very
bathetic, very heartbreaking – indeed. Anne de Marcken’s success
has been to write a zombie novel that is not in any sense about
zombies as we’ve previously given them permission to be. Here they
are struggling, just like us, to reject the cultural baggage and
separate what is really happening from what is not. They are
working to own themselves and be proud. As a sly tour of the
slow-motion disaster of the Anthropocene, It Lasts Forever and
Then It’s Over captures and concentrates the
energies of all of us listeners at the zombie hotel.’
— M. John Harrison, Times Literary Supplement
'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, author of Something New Under the Sun
'It Lasts Forever is sad, shocking, funny, prophetic,
visceral, and deeply human. From amid the dislocations, the
lacerations, a profound meditation arises. Highly recommended.'
— Jeff VanderMeer, author of Dead Astronauts
‘[T]he prose is exquisite and the form is inventive, and there is
plenty of white space between fragments of text and a handful of
doodles. It’s wry and moving and very beautiful.’
— Susie Mesure, Spectator
‘De Marcken’s novella is a zombie story, adapting this overused
popular trope and making it anew. It is an accomplished debut novel
from the American writer that follows the meditative wanderings of
a zombie who can’t remember her name…. [I]t is, surprisingly, full
of tender moments and sustained throughout by a love that persists
even in de Marcken’s post-apocalyptic world.’
— Brooke Boland, Sydney Morning Herald
‘[A] strange, haunting novel by Anne de Marcken, whose acerbic
voice breathes new life into the fictional possibilities of the
undead.’
— Joshua Rees, Buzz
‘Long and short, it’s hard to imagine a more erudite zombie story.
This is de Marcken’s central trope — and her triumph. She seizes
the gut-smeared cliches of The Walking Dead and
recomposes them as a philosophical odyssey. Better yet, despite her
fiction’s core seriousness, its quest for the Real, her undead
stumble through a Grand Guignol farce.’
— John Domini, Brooklyn Rail
‘Crepuscular and gradual, minimal and tender, the words and
photographic poems in Anne de Marcken’s The Accident are filled
with measured, continuous, indestructible longing.... she has a
quiet way of making you surrender, ecologically and aesthetically,
through her account’s transient, fugitive beauty and explicit
interlacing dormant fragility.’
— Vi Khi Nao, author of Human Tetris (praise for The Accident)
'The Accident takes place in that gap between seeing and
feeling, feeling and knowing, ‘a bird trapped inside your head’ and
‘something brighter than fear.’ Lunar in its hold and its hope,
this is a book that reaches through trauma to uncover memory as an
end and a beginning. With its deft shifts in perspective, its
images at once soothingly atmospheric and hauntingly
specific, The Accident gestures toward a dream where
intimate claustrophobia gives way to a landscape that shifts with
the imagination.'
— Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Sketchtasy (praise
for The Accident)
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