Experimental novel, told in dreams and photos, with 150 images, diagrams, equations, and sheet music (playable on piano). The unhappy story of a person pursued by dreams of burning. This is the result of 15 years of work & teaching the history of fiction with images, from Rodenbach to Sebald, Cole, and Rankine. It's intended to break new ground in the use of images and narrative. The first page here is the epigraph. The second page is near the end. The penultimate paragraph of that page is a reference to a well-known work of 19th c. fiction. First person to guess it gets a free copy! Preorders are open now via Unnamed Press, tinyurl.com/longstrangebook. More at jameselkins.com/ writing-schedule. ADVANCE REVIEW COPY - NOT FOR SALE T hat winter ruined any hope I had of experiencing my life as a story, beginning with a cry in a hospital and developing right up to the latest click of the plastic second hand on the large wall-mounted, battery-operated clock that I bought because, as I once said to Adela, I need to keep better track of time: that year I lost the capacity to manage my days, keep my mind on my job, keep on good behavior, keep hold of my family, attend to what people are actually saying, distinguish animals from humans, day from night. That winter tore me from my­ self and pushed me into the world of dreams. What I learned that year: Reason is like aspirin. Everyone takes it, because it's supposedly a wonder drug. But if your headache is serious enough aspirin won' t stop it. Reason is like a child who won' t stop crying. You know you love it, you can't live without it, but it's intensely annoying and you wish it would just sit there and slobber. Reason is like a runner who does not know when the race is over, she runs for days, without food, without water, until she collapses. As soon as she recovers, she gets up and starts running again. Reason is like Penelope undoing at night what was done during the day. She is canny, she knows the real work is done when people are asleep. Anything that takes place during the day is nonsense. What happened that year made me into something different. I feel like a caterpillar winding myself into a cocoon, settling in, losing my appetite for leaves, forgetting my fear of birds, contracting my soft green body into a hard brown shell, erasing my caterpillar memories, saying goodbye to the sun and rain, becoming a pupa. Soon I will be lost to myself, and before that happens, I want to write this book. ADVANCE REVIEW COPY - NOT FOR SALE Little Sam be ga It's almost time. The piano is gone. Steven has been cleaning out the hi basement and loading up a U-Haul for the drive to Cattaraugas. He eVi keeps bringing things up to me and asking if he can have them, or if he dr can throw them out. CaJ He just found something even older than this book. It is a booklet of drawings little Sam made in grammar school. He would have been th five years old or so. The pages are oversize colored paper, sewn together we with red ribbons. Someone, I suppose my mother, wrote "Samuel's he alphabet" on the cover. Each page illustrates an animal and a letter of mc1 the alphabet. evt The letter "X' is accompanied by an aardvark, drawn like a puppy with long ears. "B" is for bear, a black lump made by swirling the crayon around and around and adding eyes. "C" is a white cat, with long curving claws and whiskers. I looked through the booklet, hoping to remember what little Sam thought when he drew the animals. Or maybe I'd find intriguing simi­ larities between his animals and the ones Samuel saw. In some of the drawings the animals are in landscapes. The lion stands in front of a big building shaped like a triumphal arch. The panda is next to a pair of scissors. Behind the monkey a broad, green shaft of light pierces a cloud. A toucan rests on a large leaf. Behind it is an ocean. The sky is violet, lilac, gold, and rose. "W" is for wasp, roughly made of impatient black and yellow stripes. I can imagine a child's small hand clenched awkwardly around the crayon. There is no "X:' "Y" is for yak, a shaggy dog perched on a snowy mountain. "Z" is zebra, of course, a wooden-looking striped horse standing next to a stick figure holding a spear. JAMES ELKINS / 598 thc1