Souvenirs
A collection of visions shared across cyberspace, Souvenirs, a collaboration between authors Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee, celebrates fragments from the literary afterlife. In Souvenirs, a philosophically astute, poetically searing collection of miniature fictions and contemporary fables, objects take on shapes of their own designs creating a composite map to a world populated with little transparent souls and ghost ships in lost bottles; a menagerie of curios; photophores of bioluminescence humming in the depths: light begetting light, deep calling to deep. In these twenty-seven prose gems, it seems that Colarusso and Lee are writing from a single mind as they strike a balance between humor and philosophy; the acute and the everlasting. The ideas they discuss—religion, faith, universality, continuance—are large, but their prose is accessible, and at times outright hilarious. Strange, compelling, and arcane considerations of watches, jade, seaweed, and cake, among many other items, come through with stylistic prowess and earnest, intelligent considerations. Souvenirs adds complexity to the mundane, re-centers the iconic, and gifts the reader with nothing short of astonishment; wonder baked into each delicious slice.

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Souvenirs
A collection of visions shared across cyberspace, Souvenirs, a collaboration between authors Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee, celebrates fragments from the literary afterlife. In Souvenirs, a philosophically astute, poetically searing collection of miniature fictions and contemporary fables, objects take on shapes of their own designs creating a composite map to a world populated with little transparent souls and ghost ships in lost bottles; a menagerie of curios; photophores of bioluminescence humming in the depths: light begetting light, deep calling to deep. In these twenty-seven prose gems, it seems that Colarusso and Lee are writing from a single mind as they strike a balance between humor and philosophy; the acute and the everlasting. The ideas they discuss—religion, faith, universality, continuance—are large, but their prose is accessible, and at times outright hilarious. Strange, compelling, and arcane considerations of watches, jade, seaweed, and cake, among many other items, come through with stylistic prowess and earnest, intelligent considerations. Souvenirs adds complexity to the mundane, re-centers the iconic, and gifts the reader with nothing short of astonishment; wonder baked into each delicious slice.

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Souvenirs

Souvenirs

Souvenirs

Souvenirs

Overview

A collection of visions shared across cyberspace, Souvenirs, a collaboration between authors Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee, celebrates fragments from the literary afterlife. In Souvenirs, a philosophically astute, poetically searing collection of miniature fictions and contemporary fables, objects take on shapes of their own designs creating a composite map to a world populated with little transparent souls and ghost ships in lost bottles; a menagerie of curios; photophores of bioluminescence humming in the depths: light begetting light, deep calling to deep. In these twenty-seven prose gems, it seems that Colarusso and Lee are writing from a single mind as they strike a balance between humor and philosophy; the acute and the everlasting. The ideas they discuss—religion, faith, universality, continuance—are large, but their prose is accessible, and at times outright hilarious. Strange, compelling, and arcane considerations of watches, jade, seaweed, and cake, among many other items, come through with stylistic prowess and earnest, intelligent considerations. Souvenirs adds complexity to the mundane, re-centers the iconic, and gifts the reader with nothing short of astonishment; wonder baked into each delicious slice.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781936097418
Publisher: Baobab Press
Publication date: 04/05/2022
Pages: 90
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andrew E. Colarusso is author of The Sovereign (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017) and Creance; or, Comest Thou Cosmic Nazarite (Northwestern UniversityPress). He was editor in chief of The Broome Street Review from 2009 to 2017. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored two novels, Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017) and The Maze of Transparencies (Ellipsis 2019). Lee’s translations of Li Qingzhao’s writing, Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose of Li Qingzhao, is the first volume in English to collect Li’s work in both genres (Singing Bone 2018). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She currently lives in greater Chicago.

Interviews

Notes on the Collaboration:

Origins

I love postcards. I used to send postcards often before the pandemic.

I sent a postcard to Andrew after a trip back east to Brown, our alma mater. During my visit I had stood in an interior space with strangers and friends, breathed the same room air, ridden in a taxi, and exchanged syllables in the hyphenated pauses between us, and made small talk. Neither of us had any idea how much the world would change by the spring of the new year. On this trip back east, in the flaming autumn foliage, I took for granted all the things we used to do before the world closed its shutters. In my mind’s eye, that world is telescoped, the wrong end first, into a time capsule with a lens onto the past.

On a street whose name escapes me, a word like benevolent or benefit, I ate dinner at a nearby restaurant. Did I order the fish or a beet salad? Were there baskets of bread we tore apart with our hands, and pats of butter? Or was it dipping oil with balsamic vinegar? I remember my friend, Sawako, ordered a seafood bouillabaisse with lobster, scallops, jumbo shrimp, other gorgeous treasures. Andrew, hovering like an angel, was not there, per se. In these interactions, we were ships passing in the night – journeying through the same halls more than a decade apart, we were lanternfish swimming in the same writerly marina yet glowing in parallel universes. Not only did we miss each other in the city, it was Andrew and his colleague, Laird, who invited me to spend time on the hill.

Shortly after I returned to California, I wrote a postcard to Andrew, thanking him for the invitation. I believe the postcard had one word emblazoned on it, possibly “Belief,” or “Faith,” or maybe, “Dazzling.” This postcard, too, is a souvenir I picked up before the world closed up; ephemera from before we were unsure if postcards, as fomites for contagion, might kill us and mailed them sparingly, if at all. In this case, I recall the postcard traveling through the transcontinental air with bittersweet nostalgia. On this card, I mentioned to Andrew my openness to collaborating on literary projects, if he would be willing. He responded with an idea pulled out of the splendid place I imagine is his labyrinthine mind of testimonies about God, sacred texts, and fabulae.

Andrew described a collection of imaginary histories drawn from literary or aesthetic sources, anchored in an assortment of objects: watches, apples, photographer’s cloth, space rock, even cake. Souvenirs, he said. I said, yes. Andrew opened an electronic document, shared it across cyberspace, and we wrote in a steady cadence over several months. Andrew composed the first vignette, then I wrote a brief response; as we fell into a call-and-response rhythm, fragments from the literary afterlife of objects took on shapes of their own design in our collection of miniature fictions or contemporary fables— a composite map to another world of little transparent souls or ghost ships in lost bottles, a menagerie of curios, or the glowing lanternfish dwelling in the Red Sea with their photophores of bioluminescence so they can find one another in the depths where divers without the apparatus of exploration are plunged into darkness: light begets light, deep calls to deep. - Karen An-hwei Lee

משִָׁיח / mashiach / messiah

You wait for something like a postcard, perfect, to arrive inviting you to the dance of your lives and risk forgetting the receipt in your pocket with the spice cake recipe scrawled on its back. You think to yourself I’m not a baker and give yourself permission to forget that there is also written on this receipt an address and that address, you never realize, is that of the house of joy. What these two objects have in common: the language on the postcard and the language on your crumpled receipt are both thinner than the papers they’ve been written on. Thinner, even, than this language is you, checking your watch for the time, anxious for the arrival of your postcard and oblivious to the receipt in a pocket against your hip. The receipt is, after all, sharing space with loose string, gum wrapper foil, tattered cloth, a band-aid, old movie stubs—things you deem not quite trash, otherwise they’d have been thrown out, but not of value enough to remember. So they carry on quietly against the body and you continue waiting for the postcard, pink and on its front Believe. You know what it looks like. It’s only a matter of time. It’s only a matter of time before it comes. - Andrew Colarusso

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