“Alison serves up an elegant meditation on aging, art, and nature, inspired by a famous villa in the French Riviera…”
— Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
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“What if everything you knew, everything you’ve been taught about writing, is wrong?”
NYLON
“A playful and exciting book that opens up all sorts of new possibilities for narrative”
Sarah Boon, Chicago Review of Books
“A supersaturated mindfuck of hedonistic extravaganza . . . a special kind of literary criticism.”
Katy Waldman, New Yorker
*Starred review* “A boundlessly inventive look at narrative form . . . filled with clarity and wit, underlain with formidable erudition.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Doctors don’t imitate Galen. Why should writers follow Aristotle? Jane Alison in her fresh original book about narrative is our new Aristotle.”
—Edmund White
“One of my favorite books this year was Nine Island . . . which is funny and wise and such a closely observed account of a single woman’s life during her time living in Florida. . . I felt less alone and freakish while reading the book.”
—Viv Albertine in The Guardian
“Outstanding . . . a very smart, funny, offbeat novel that muses on the male gaze, the female gaze, love, lust, loneliness, self-sufficiency, and how hard it is to care for even—or maybe especially—what you love (including, maybe especially, yourself). Gorgeously descriptive.”
—Library Journal
“Beautifully cerebral . . . Alison’s novel establishes female desire (or the lack thereof) as an enormous, transformative, literature-worthy topic. Which is something Ovid knew all along.”
—Lit Hub’s Best Books of 2016
“A beautiful novel that reminds us that solitude does not equal loneliness.”
—Publisher’s Weekly Best Books of 2016
“The stuff of fiction is what allows this book to attain a sort of elasticity, including leaps in time, intentionally abrupt transitions, and metaphorically rich language that brushes against the fantastical.”
—Read it Forward
“Jane Alison masterfully constructs an interiority unlike anything before in her novel Nine Island. The reader has no choice but to ride every intimate wave that splashes over the page.”
—New Pages
“Nine Island is a nerve-jangling book full of the giddy wit of the emotionally starving, the unfulfillable desire of being in love with being in love, and the weirdly sexy conversation of souls in free fall.”
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life
“Nine Island is a crackling incantation, brittle and brilliant and hot and sad and full of sideways humor that devastates and illuminates all at once.”
—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“Wonderful. . . . With echoes of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, Alison has forged a haunting and emotionally precise portrait, a beautiful reminder that solitude does not equal loneliness.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Jane Alison is the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes; four novels—Natives and Exotics, The Marriage of the Sea, The Love-Artist, and Nine Island; and Change Me, a new translation of Ovid’s stories of sexual transformation. Her latest work is Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.
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Read More“JA + Ander Monson on Narrative Form” in PLOUGHSHARES
http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/jane-alison-and-ander-monson-on-narrative-form/
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Excerpt – The Love-Artist
Prologue Now the word is given, the horses are lashed, and the wagon jolts down the dark street, a helmeted soldier seated at each side and Ovid, the exile, between them. Flames glare through the eyes and mouths of stone lanterns, and the blue night air swirls about him like water. The Palatine, crusted […]
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Excerpt – Change Me
“Hermaphroditus and Salmacis” (Metamorphoses 4.285-388) Hear how the Salmacis pool got an evil name for its powerful waters that enervate men. The potency’s famous—the cause, not so known. Change Me In the caves of Ida, nymphs once nursed a boy, the child of Mercury and divine Venus. You could see both mother and father […]
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Excerpt – The Sisters Antipodes
“Swapping Fathers, Swiftly” Reprinted from the New York Times, Modern Love column, 1 March 2009. Whenever I take the train from Washington to New York, I relive how it was in 1973, when my sister and I went to see our father for the first time in seven years. She was 14 and I was […]
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Excerpt – The Marriage of the Sea
Pages 238 – 247: Max signed all the papers in the emerald-green building near the warehouse district, and then he went with the keys to find the rental car. It was emerald-green, too, small and bright, like an insect. He walked around it, inspecting, put a foot to a tire, and finally opened the door […]
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