A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be

A searing, sensual novel with photographs, A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be weaves together southern fabulism and gothic fury. At this devil’s crossroads of the King James Bible and the Egyptian Book of the Dead emerge the ghosts and realities of sex, race, violence in haunting exhumations of half-buried secrets. Quintan Ana Wikswo pulls at the restless, volatile threads of seditious American iconoclasts Zora Neale Hurston, Patti Smith, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison. Wikswo’s unforgettable and relentless reinvestigation of the American soul unfolds on the unruly, mixed-race, queer-sexed margins of a conservative 1930s Southern town. In the wake of abandonment by her husband, an impoverished young midwife and her twin daughters create a hospice and sanctuary for the town’s outcasts within a deserted antebellum plantation house. The twins inhabit a fantastical world of ancient resistances, macabre births, glorious deaths, ravenous love affairs, clandestine sorceries, and secret madnesses—a site where the legacies of catastrophic injustice, bigotry, brutality, and grief contend with unquenchable desires for restitution and freedom.

Literature & Fiction

Wikswo, Quintan Ana

United States

Stalking Horse Press

When love, lust, and longing, have all but killed you, and Newtonian physics has become too painfully restrictive, is it possible to find freedom in another dimension? Have you lost the will to live, or the will to live as human? Castaways in unmapped terrain, the characters in The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far burrow underground in tunnels made by ancient nautiluses. They lay eggs by the seashore, and greet the sailors who come to carry those eggs away. And each by each, they choose to live—but to surrender their human forms. From within their peculiar neither-here-nor-there-doms, they learn to live in unbounded states, with edges that can no longer be marked, and meanings that can no longer be defined. Quintan Ana Wikswo is a writer and visual artist recognized for adventurous works that integrate her fiction, poetry, memoir, and essay with her photographs, performances, and films. Her works are published, performed, and exhibited throughout the world, including anthologies, artist books, magazines such as Tin House, Guernica, Conjunctions, the Kenyon Review, and Gulf Coast, and in multiple solo museum exhibitions in New York City and Berlin. A human rights worker for two decades, she now uses salvaged government typewriters and cameras to navigate known, unknown, and occluded worlds, especially obscured sites where crimes against humanity have taken place. She lives in Brooklyn.

The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

Coffee House Press

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Books by Wikswo, Quintan Ana

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wikswo, Quintan Ana. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be

A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be

The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far