Report from a Place of Burning - Softcover

Looney, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1948585006 ISBN 13: 9781948585002

Publisher: Leapfrog Press, 2018

Synopsis

It’s summer in a small, Midwestern city, and babies are burning to death in their cribs under odd circumstances. A number of theories are presented by the six narrators of the novel, but the truth of just what is going on is elusive, and it is up to the reader to discover the truth, since one of the underlying issues of the novel is the difference between knowing and believing. In addition to the babies burning in their cribs, there are other types of burning articulated by the six narrators, everything from a mother whose baby was one of the victims surrounding herself with her paintings of flames engulfing buildings and bodies to a widow who is dealing with her own passions released by the death of her husband to a widower who deals with the dead in a very personal manner to a detective becoming obsessed with solving the crime of the burned babies to an adulterer burning with a passion for the married woman he has been having an affair with to a prophet who sees everything that happens around him in terms of the book of Revelation. Metaphorical and real burning is a part of the lives of each of the six narrators of this novel in which music and art are recurring elements, as is the strange miraculous behavior of memory. Memory and music and art, the novel suggests, can reshape the world as well as haunt us and devastate us and, now and then, save us.

About this title

About the Author:

George Looney is the founder of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect, Translation Editor of Mid-American Review, and Co-Founder of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival. His work has been published in more than 40 literary magazines, including New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Chautauqua, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Mid American Review, to name a few. His books include books include Hermits in Our Own Flesh: The Epistles of an Anonymous Monk (Oloris Publishing, 2016), Meditations Before the Windows Fail (Lost Horse Press, 2015), the book-length poem Structures the Wind Sings Through (Full/Crescent Press, 2014), Monks Beginning to Waltz (Truman State University Press, 2012), A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), Open Between Us (Turning Point, 2010), The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995 Bluestem Award), and the 2008 novella Hymn of Ash (the 2007 Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award).

Review:

“Report from a Place of Burning is utterly original, but it is also the work of a master of the traditions of storytelling. In language that is exquisite but also precise, George Looney unspools a host of secrets that culminate in a haunting and moving whole. With such vivid and earthly, but also dreamlike, imagery, he invites the reader to experience these accumulating revelations, casting a spell as much as offering a tale. But as lyrical as it is, make no mistake: this is a real story, one you won’t mistake for an experiment. Even as you’ll want to linger over the sentences, so musical and striking, and consider the brilliance of this careful and unusual construction of a novel, you’ll want to turn the page, breathless for what’s next. This is that rare, wonderful sort of fiction that casts a spell, fills the reader with admiration for the writer’s talent, but entertains you, too.” —Laura Kasischke, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
“Looney’s novel introduces Rainier Maria Rilke to Sherwood Anderson, escorts them into our 21st century, and invites them to sing. And sing they do. A gyre of desire and devastation, vision and transfiguration, Report from a Place of Burning dazzles.” —Ann Pancake, author of Strange as This Weather Has Been
Gorgeous. Haunting. Unforgettable. Like every real mystery, Report from a Place of Burning lives on, creating questions and leaving one hungry for answers. Looney’s novel smolders with captivating voices, shocking possibilities, and private histories of characters whose heartache, loss, and love are seared behind my eyes.”—Aimee Parkison, author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman
“A fabulous mix of the arcane and ordinary. A familiar Rust Belt setting—a defunct Heinz factory with the acrid smell of vinegar lingering in the air—gives the story a desperation and Philip Dick-ish, dangerous, dystopian feel... the perfect surreal setting for this bleak (although at times, quite humorous) narrative and concoction of strange events... In a profound way [the novel] speaks, metaphorically, to “the times.” Amidst all the preoccupation with apocalyptic/Armageddon books/television/movies, the sense of impending doom in every facet of the news, and the rough beast that has slouched his way into the White House, here’s a nod to something that passeth all understanding, with a Julian of Norwich ending of radical optimism, in spite of grim, horrific events.” —Sara Pritchard

About this edition

• Publisher: Leapfrog Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1948585006
• ISBN 13: 9781948585002
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180