Glass Eel

A Novel

Häftad, Engelska, 2027

379 kr

Kommande

Exploring the power of female friendships in times of despair In the near-future United States, abortion is criminalized. Women are not only stripped of bodily autonomy but are also arrested and put through various punishments, including a Christian fundamentalist rehabilitation program and manual labor. Thrown together in this harrowing corrections process, two women, E and M, form a deep bond. Rippling through time and space, Glass Eel illuminates an imminent nightmare while exploring the unbreakable force of female friendship in times of despair. Before serving their sentences, E is a romantic who is prone to vivid, maladaptive daydreaming, and M is an empiricist studying to become a marine biologist. Isolated by her devout mother, E turns inward, developing a passion for poetry and myth. At the exact wrong time, she becomes involved with a married man. When E becomes pregnant, he gaslights her, denying their entire relationship. M, while working as a part-time performer at an underwater mermaid theater, carries the heavy responsibility of being the sole provider for her sick mother. One night, she reluctantly accompanies her roommate to a party where she's raped. Both E and M make the difficult decision to terminate their pregnancies and are eventually arrested for it. Brought together to serve their sentences, E and M painstakingly labor underground to unclog the Chicago sewers at night. By day, they wander the bleak shore of a radioactive industrial lake, home to mysterious unearthly creatures. E and M unravel psychologically, desperate to cope with their impossible new reality as they grasp at their last real connection—their friendship—to make it through this dystopian time. Glass Eel explores the bond between E and M to show how people hold each other together when everything feels like it is falling apart.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2027-03-02
Mått140 x 216 x undefined mm
Vikt454 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieJuniper Prize for Fiction
Antal sidor192
FörlagUniversity of Massachusetts Press
ISBN9781625349903

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"Casey Bell captures the feeling of despair and terror which comes from arbitrary shifts in law, and yet this is a hopeful book about how we survive and are sustained by community. Bell has staked out a marvelous, unbounded territory of her own, where glass eels speak to us and the world is larger and more interconnected than we ever realized."—Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Book of Love "Glass Eel shuffles the cards of causality to emphasize how women struggle against abasement. Reader, let these nightmare quotidians inspire your allegiance to all Bell writes."—Terese Svoboda, author of The Long Swim "Glass Eel is a wild book! I loved it! Inventive, strange and deeply unsettling. A view of a terrifying near future that's increasingly becoming less absurdist and more bleakly probable. I was so glad E and M had each other to navigate the American hellscape."—Katya Apekina, author of Mother Doll "Glass Eel is a startling, brilliant, deeply original tour de force. Casey Bell explores female embodiment with exquisitely granular detail, and sheds fresh light on the grotesque systems that churn and clog beneath the surface and impact us all. She reminds us that kindness and hope can survive even the most toxic environments, and are ultimately what will save us. This book blew my mind and shored up my heart and filled me with awe and gratitude for Bell's singular, spectacular voice."—Gayle Brandeis, author of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, The Body, and Loss "With wildly innovative structure and kaleidoscopic scope, Glass Eel explodes the conventions of the novel and rebuilds the form anew, offering an exhilarating, intimate portrait of female friendship, survival, and defiance. Absolutely revelatory."—Claire Stanford, author of Happy for You