A young writer and Napoleon Bonaparte share a penetrating gaze, suicidal tendencies, the pain of exile, a love of literature and strong coffee, and currently: a body.
Napoleon Bonaparte is now only an orb of light, stuck in solitary confinement across the great divide. But when a young woman travels with her dog to the island of Elba to conduct research into Napoleon's exile there, he discovers he can usurp her body while she sleeps. Ecstatically, he pens his posthumous memoirs through her, obsessed with securing eternal admiration and renown. The young woman, however, is equally fixated on the idea of disappearing without a trace, weary of the ravages of social media on society.
Expertly employing historical surrealism to critique orientalism, megalomaniac masculinity, and colonialism, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (Call Me Zebra) rages against the abandonment of the natural world in favor of digital realms with satirical humor and restless energy.
N. is the second book in the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, which investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming.
About the Author: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novel Savage Tongues, and Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the John Gardner Award, and longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers Award and a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" award for her debut novel, Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012). Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fellowship from ART OMI and has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. Her work has been translated into half a dozen languages. She is the director of the MFA program in Creative Writing ang the University of Notre Dame and the founder of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance, a lecture series that focuses on the study of literatures that have been shaped by histories of territorial and linguistic politics, colonialism, military domination and gross human rights violations. She has lived in Iran, Spain, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and currently lives in Chicago.
