Fiction. The winner of the 2nd annual Starcherone Fiction Prize, a blind-judged open competition, Nina Shope's debut collection of three novellas demonstrate stunning range and intensity. In the title novella, a young woman learns that her mother is dying and finds herself stalked by nightmarish figures--the hideously transformed maiden, Arachne, an upside-down man in a Miro painting, and the spiders that hatch and haunt the text like tumors--all coinciding with the emergence of her own sexual awareness. With "In Urbem," Shope imagines an archetypal ancient city, that city beneath the pavement of all modern cities, in fantastic prose reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Finally, "Hagiographies" explorestwo intense female friendships, both of which are suddenly and arbitrarily shattered, in a wildly inventive narrative proceeding by means of juxtaposed images rather than sequential events. "The dazzling debut of an immensely talented and big-hearted writer"--George Saunders.

HANGINGS: THREE NOVELLAS

Literature & Fiction

Shope, Nina

United States

Starcherone Books

<p>Winner of the Dzanc Prize for Fiction<br />
A work of brilliant and innovative historical fiction, Asylum delves into the disturbing and seductive relationship between a young hysteric named Augustine and renowned nineteenth-century French neurologist J.M. Charcot. As Charcot risks his career to investigate the controversial disease of hysteria, Augustine struggles to make him acknowledge their interdependence and shared desires―until a new lover, M., drives them all to the brink of fracture.<br />
Drawing upon the medical photography, hypnotic states, and “grand demonstrations” that accompanied Charcot’s research, Asylum traces the deterioration of the dynamic between doctor and patient as they transform from mutually entranced creators to jealous and spurned paramours, to fierce rivals, and finally to bitter enemies. Told in lyrical, feverish, and sometimes delirious prose, Nina Shope delivers a captivating narrative at the crossroads of Mary Shelley and Donna Tartt.</p>

Asylum

Genre Fiction

Dzanc Books

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Books by Shope, Nina