Black Brane

Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, teacher, and translator living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, which won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. His nonfiction book, Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, was nominated for a HWA Stoker award in 2023. Pest, a novel, was published by CLASH in 2023. He teaches at CUNY Hostos.

“An unapologetic and disorienting journey into theoretical physics and the uncanny mystery of holes. You don’t need to be aware of Ligotti’s work to enjoy Black Brane; you just have to be open to a type of weird fiction that is less about plot and satisfying resolutions and more invested in the uncanny and testing the fabric of reality.” —LOCUSPrevious Praise"Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out... Cisco's visionary genius.” —Publishers Weekly"The alchemy of words ceasing to be words, words seamlessly melting before our eyes into grandiose imagery, into soaring hallucination, into fever dreams that tap directly into our subconscious and perfectly describe emotions that cannot be described is something no author achieves with more effect than Michael Cisco." —Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World"A rivetingly strange novel in which Cisco mixes game theory, serious philosophy, SF, and dark fantasy into something at once unreal and really entrancing. Kind of like what might happen if Wyndham Lewis decided to write like M. John Harrison and had Martin Heidegger as his editor. Member is a complex, compelling work." —Brian Evenson, author of Last Days