Piranesi's Figures

Piranesi’s Figures is a romp through the magnificent ruins of at least two marriages and one attempt at child-rearing, and a gleefully reckless contortion of novelistic conventions, sexual practices, and family dynamics. Hannah Calder peers into hidden corners and under creaking beds with such relentless abandon that even her own characters bristle at her advances. The result is a dense witches’ brew of storytelling, a feminist-tinged fairy tale that drapes the dirtiest secrets of domestic wreckage and illicit love in fancy dress and commands them to twirl around for our amusement.

“At a time when writing is increasingly informational and pragmatic, it is refreshing to read prose derived from interior conditions, where ‛[t]he dream does its job... [t]hen it leaves in its place a hole where a story could burrow in and root itself.’ Reading Calder is to move through the world barefoot over asphalt, grass, sand and water. This is sensual, insightful writing.” -- Michael Turner, author of 8 X 10 and The Pornographer’s Poem