“Always Crashing in the Same Car presents a phantasmagorical mosaic of facts and fantasies concerning the life and art of David Bowie, for whom the mask always melted into the face and vice versa. A meditation on memory, loss, and love; on the projection of a writer’s self through their chosen idols; on the artist’s attempt to orchestrate the manner of a life’s conclusion. All this, Lance Olsen delivers, and more.”

“Already the author of among the most distinguished bodies of work in contemporary American letters, one that includes marvels like Girl Imagined by Chance, Dreamlives of Debris and My Red Heaven, Lance Olsen outdoes himself with Always Crashing in the Same Car. As he takes us on a moving, multi-nodal journey through the stunning kaleidoscope that was David Bowie’s life, Olsen offers up a generous vision of the indispensable role of art, love and friendship as — with old mortality in the offing — we prosecute the wonders of our days and the challenges of our nights.”

“Lance Olsen concocts a world in which the concoction of self is spectacularly illegible and gorgeously weird. Biography, lit crit, metafiction, history: everything and nothing belongs. Time is confetti and here comes the wind. Love and fatherhood, fortune and fame. Augury, memory, dream. Nothing’s sortable. This book blew my mind—it’s all questions, super-charged and divine.”

“Bewildered and bereft, adrift in the ever-grief of his wife’s death, scholar Alec Nolens seeks comfort by immersing himself in the sea of words surrounding David Bowie, a project he imagines as a ‘love song,’ not so much to Bowie, ‘as to the lacunae around the thought of him.’ Lance Olsen’s visionary novel is the apotheosis of such a project. Always Crashing in the Same Car offers a kaleidoscope of Davids tenderly dissolving into Davy Jones, a desperately-human human being awakened to the expansive possibilities of consciousness by the news of his own impending departure, an un-Bowied genius composing his own rapturous elegy to this transient interlude we call a life.”

“In Always Crashing in the Same Car, David Bowie woos Iman with tales of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, that wonder-cabinet of the lurid imaginary. So, too, Lance Olsen’s novel, which presents Bowie as Citizen Kane, as the Dylan of I’m Not There, as that lyric which won’t parse, that image which becomes iconic but can’t simply communicate. Olsen ellipsizes a greedy-yet-giving Bowie, reader as much as rocker, neither celebrated nor reviled—Davy, determined to never be Mr. Jones.”

“Precise, intensely readable dissections of a life imagined, its trail of clues strewn through evidence that unsettles the idea that any person can ever be known or understood, let alone one whose life was a capacious library of fictions.”

“I can’t help but adore Olsen’s willingness to rescue text from the screen and set it free on the page.”

“To read Skin Elegies is to ping between verbal asterisms generated by de-selving selves, to become, in the process, de-selved yourself. What is a mind without the brain to house it? Lance Olsen has written an historiographic neuronovel of residues and traces, static and sparks. Skin Elegies is a love poem from the future and a countdown to the past. It’s a new structure for thinking being, now.”

“Skin Elegies is the novel that the twenty-first century has been waiting for. Brilliantly conceived and impossible to sum up because it radiates in so many directions, it poignantly articulates the always-ever-present of the Now, relating experiences as disparate in time and space as John Lennon’s murder, the plastic smell inside an astronaut’s helmet, the consciousness of mountains. With the lyricism of poetry, its clouds of association conjure a theater of memory so profound and interconnected that we feel in our guts how the past, indeed, isn’t really past. Which is another way of saying, the future is already here; it just isn’t finished.”

“Lance Olsen’s newest work is an amazing literary experiment.”

“Skin Elegies is an enormously subtle and complex feat of the imagination, blending historical and contemporary artifacts and memories within a much larger and vaguely conspiratorial context fitting for some its late sixties setting. Shades of Pynchon and DeLillo and all Lance Olsen in this important new book.”

“Not since the revolutionary novels of Rudy Wurlitzer in the 1960s and 1970s have I encountered such a stunningly ambitious and astonishing narrative bricolage as Lance Olsen’s Skin Elegies. This meaty metanovel takes an esthetically and judiciously selected handful of our most vital history from 1945 to a prescient 2072, atomizes and digitizes it, then hits the SHUFFLE button before replaying the events through a set of hallucinogenic filters that Instagram would kill for. The effect is like riding a rollercoaster through a set of stargates, looping in an out of a multiverse composed of unforgettable characters and scintillant prose-poems. As fresh as the unfolding new decade, yet as eternal as the oneiric oracles of Tiresias, this book rebuilds our shared past and channels our mutual futures.”

“In Skin Elegies, Lance Olsen takes the notion of the ghost in the machine to its superlative. Grappling with the human limits of and capacities for violence, grief, tragedy, and tenderness, Skin Elegies asks us to contemplate how the self is constructed and managed in and beyond the twenty-first century. A novel of kaleidoscopic horror―and Olsen at his most haunting.”

“Reading Skin Elegies feels like watching your mind explode, translating and transfiguring its limitless possibilities into a brilliant galaxy all around and piercingly inside you. Memories spark and intensify, each flare fueled by compassion, invention, despair, horror. We are not ourselves, alone. Lance Olsen’s spectacularly innovative novel is a song of exaltation for the limitlessness of our minds―and a lament for limits of our bodies.”

“The curiously soulful mosaic of Skin Elegies‘s stories of connections missed, broken, catastrophic, and impossible is a reminder that, for all that has been and will be made of Lance Olsen’s architectonic innovations, his novels are never other than deeply humane and inspirited, not to mention pure pleasure for the adventurous reader. Skin Elegies is horrific, elegiac, far-seeing, and brilliant.”

“Lance Olsen’s literary experiments are a constant source of wonder. He has the rare ability to reinvent not only himself but the text on the page. His innovative, interrogative prose feels uniquely suited for the crisis of our time. Held together as much by the couple in the supercomputer and the nine other narrators as by the reader herself, Olsen boldly challenges us to recognize that our ability to create meaning in the present might just be what saves us.”

“Visions erupt throughout this magnificent text, a 21st-century metamorphoses, an Ovid come back to restore us to awe. The comparison might make other writers quail, but not Lance Olsen, the American most of the moment and farthest off the chain. Here he often works with figures from history, like the Challenger astronauts and the victims at Columbine, but even those who never made the headlines make bold and bruising new shapes of their stories. Skin Elegies shreds.”

“Rarely is genuine innovation this heartfelt. Through erudition and capacious prose, Olsen achieves a kind of cultural autopsy of an inflamed space and time. The result is a privileged view of naked humanity, consoled by art, science, and the rest, but ultimately unable to escape its baseness. A powerful work.“

“Lance Olsen’s My Red Heaven is a superb evocation of a specific time and place — Berlin, 10 June 1927 — that captures the intellectual ferment, the descent into decadence, and rise of Nazism during the Weimar Republic. With historically precise detailing and grimly gorgeous imagery, Olsen portrays a number of notable people traversing the day, conveyed from a variety of points-of-view — even a dog’s — and in a variety of 1920s forms: Joycean interior monologue, Dos Passosian newsreel, UFA film script, Benjaminian notes, and more. My Red Heaven is an intellectual and stylistic tour de force from one of America’s most consistently innovative writers.”

“Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what is it to be alive.”

“Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven, Otto Freundlich’s abstract cubist painting, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint, turning his fiercely attentive, unbounded love to every being in every moment, exposing infinite unknown dimensions, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment.”

“In this 24-hour novel, Olsen explores new subjectivities and new histories both after and before the moments directly written about. It’s fascinating and wonderfully readable. Kafka, Nabokov, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all make their appearances…and strange lists of newsworthy events cascade down before us now and again. It’s a fitting follow-up to Calendar of Regrets and beautifully written.”

“Dreamlives of Debris is a stunning song cycle on the pixelation of memory in a hyperdigitalized universe, opening out into an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful meditation on nothing less than the erasure of time itself.”

“Lance Olsen opens up an astonishing world of thought and emotion—a place distant but familiar that hangs almost out of the reach of our daily perception…. A beautiful and moving reading experience, Dreamlives of Debris is a unique and impressive achievement.”

“Breaking boundaries of horror, science fiction, nonfiction, love story, and myth, this rare and brilliant novel reinvents the female ‘monster’ in the form of a disfigured girl. Subverting the hero’s journey, Debris goes on a quest to find her self within an impossible labyrinth where architecture mirrors the disfigured female body, imprisoning and revealing a girl monster who stands between humanity and the darkness. In this world where what seems to be monstrous is more human than human, the stories most difficult to tell are the ones we most need to be told.”

“In a rapturous fusion of myth, premonition, philosophy, and human history, Dreamlives of Debris delivers us to the pure poetry of perception. I fell in love with Debris. Monstrous in form, radiant in spirit, she hears everyone: Sappho, Sophocles, Borges, Plato, a traveler on the Silk Road, Danielle Steele. Those who dare to listen this way will be transfigured, scattered through time and space, bewildered, ecstatically alive, forever lost in a vast labyrinth of infinite possibilities.”

“Olsen is a master of an evocative, expressive prose.”

“In the world of contemporary fiction, Lance Olsen is a rock star.”

“Filled with humor, dazzle, and a reality that realism seldom achieves.”

“Lance Olsen is a writer whose technical ingenuity is matched only by his fertility of invention and compassion for his characters.”

“If you really want to know what great writing in the 21st century is all about . . . start here.”

“Theories of Forgetting offers us multiple moments of skilled, gifted, and inspired narration.”

“Lance Olsen is the literary astronaut we dreamt of being when we were children.”

“Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting is a remarkably fugue-like ode to the intricacies of memory. Offering two intersecting stories about illness, loss and forgetting, with annotations, this is an extremely smart and moving book about how our lives wind snail-like around one another as they risk flindering away into absence or death.”

“Perhaps no other American author writes as expansively and insightfully as Lance Olsen about what it means to be alive at this place, at this time. The power of Calendar of Regrets comes from the ease with which it convinces its readers that the most astonishing thing about life is that we are here at all: the surreal visions of Hieronymus Bosch are no more vivid than the religious minds of suicide bombers; a tourist’s experience of an exotic country; or the moment when a teacher realizes that her students will never change. Page after page, Olsen places us in the position of those first travelers in hot-air balloons whose shift in perspective allowed them to see the world they lived within as though for the first time. The long view provided by the many private metamorphoses in this novel comprise a portrait of posthumanity where forms endure, and each of us is a time traveler through them: a tour de force of elegance, thought, and transcendence.”

“Olsen pulls it off and in consistently stunning ways.”

“I’m completely sold.”

“Calendar of Regrets ultimately reminds us of the ways that art and narrative doggedly navigate that thin line between the drive for order and the deep-seated realization that the universe that greets us each morning has only increased its entropy.”

“A novel of echoes, reflections (sometimes inverted), and criss-crossing lines, Lance Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets locates nodes of intersection, spotlights the forgotten, and magnifies the unnoticed.”

“A fascinating, complex work.”

“Calendar of Regrets is one of those wonderful monsters, the intellectual page-turner.”

“Lance Olsen misbehaves in all sorts of grave and playful ways. He throws Hieronymus Bosch in the mix with Agamemnon; God in the mix with the devil. Here are postcards, podcasts, and fairy tales; terrorism and angels; aphasia and aneurysym; bludgeonings and vacuous friendships. Calendar of Regrets is a spectacular synthesis, a wild ride through a free mind.”

“Head in Flames has set a new standard for the social consciousness of postmodern narrative.”

“Lance Olsen has written an important book. Important because it manages to succeed where most innovative literature fails: it plays while being deadly serious. The structure is a tour de force of formal innovation calling to mind Pinget’s That Voice, Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, and Cortázar’s Hopscotch.”

“Recalling the radically condensed novels of David Markson, the fragmented storytelling of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the high-velocity jump cuts of an action movie—or maybe an MTV music video—Head in Flames is the rare novel that satisfies equally as an exploration of personality, character, novelistic form, and narrative potential.”

“Striking, shocking….In the world of contemporary fiction, Lance Olsen is a rock star.”

“The great power of the book . . . comes from its unflinching confrontation with painful salients in the conflict of civilizations commonly called the clash of Islam and the West.”

“A fine collage novel.”

“Olsen “outkafkas Kafka. . . . [Anxious Pleasures] calls for and urges upon us a questioning, a re-reading, a renewed reflecting again and again. Then, gradually, it opens its riches.”

“In Anxious Pleasures, a graceful, haunting work, Lance Olsen reminds us that defying classification has lasting, imaginative value.”

“What Olsen is magnificently able to do in this book is take all the timelines (present and past), and points of view, and fashion them in such a way that we get a theater of the absurd that is at once timely, comic, tragic, randomly hysterical, Priapusly (sic) pungent, dreamy and sweet, insightful and intellectually satisfying—all of it in finely modulated prose that shifts effortlessly from one inventive style to the next as each character comes on stage and speaks herself/himself alive….Olsen is a writer’s writer.”

“Anxious Pleasures is a multi-faceted jewel.”

“Lance Olsen’s new novel Anxious Pleasures does for The Metamorphosis what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead did for Hamlet: furnishes a familiar story with fresh dimensionality in order to creatively re-explore it .… Anxious Pleasures achieves a thrillingly stereophonic effect .… Daring and literarily subversive.”

“An eminently ambiguous text in the spirit of The Metamorphosis—one that, to paraphrase Olsen describing Kafka, becomes less clear the closer one looks. . . . A challenging, meticulous novel.”

“What a wonderfully and intellectually satisfying novel this is! Jeweled with gorgeous prose, rich in the copper and mahogany tints of the world before the Great War, when what, today, can seem to be little tragedies were preparing us for the overwhelming ones of the past century, Olsen’s fictive meditations on a varied cast’s watching a self devolve exploits with daring and great invention the critical notion that Kafka’s writing is entirely about the history—the ‘natural’ disasters—that would follow him.”

“Following Nietzsche’s Kisses (2006), Olsen treats another great modernist to postmodernist investigation, this time retelling Kafka’s Metamorphosis from the supporting cast’s points-of-view. Olsen hews closely to the original, and his additions, excursions and elaborations are simultaneously stimulating and entertaining. . . . Intricately woven and richly imagined, Olsen’s novel is a cerebral treat unto itself and a fine companion to Kafka’s original.”

“Engrossing . . . . Lance Olsen continues to write lyrically, joyfully.”

“This is the book Lance Olsen was placed on the planet to write. These are the themes—the vertiginous otherness of others (including oneself), the terror of everyday life (how German is it?), reading as creation, the necessary uselessness of art—Olsen has been exploring with increasing power for nearly thirty years. Here, in Anxious Pleasures, he has compressed his leitmotifs into an extraordinarily beautiful, dense, complex, and moving novel.”

“Very clever postmodern gamesmanship. . . . In analyzing, extending, glossing and interpreting [Kafka’s] important novella, Olsen seems to create a metamorphosis of his own.”

“Olsen, who demonstrated his brilliance in probing the heights and depths of human consciousness in Nietzsche’s Kisses, here manages to go even deeper. . . . [He] makes Metamorphosis even more unsettling, absurd, and darkly humorous than ever. Highly recommended.”

“Combining his dexterity for cutting-edge experimentation and love classic literature, Olsen takes on Franz Kafka’s surreal novella The Metamorphosis and ingeniously adapts the story line to multiple perspectives.”

“Nietzsche’s Kisses is a brilliant achievement, a seamless, precise, marvelously affecting novel that must be read by everyone who appreciates the best of today’s fiction.”

“Olsen … depicts this fallen übermensch with inventiveness and stark-raving prose.”

“Nietzsche’s Kisses is a brilliant book and a book of brilliances, one which follows the logic of the disintegration of a great mind with poetic grace, profound comedy, and a sense of tragic inevitability. With this novel Lance Olsen moves well beyond mere experimentalism to occupy a ground worthy of the magisterial and manic figure of Nietzsche himself. This is a deeply moving, compelling, intelligent, and utterly human account of the power of mind and the glory of post-history’s first and most vulnerable superman.”

“This is a complex work—invigorating and exhauting at the same time. I was dazzled by it.”

“Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses has a Dionysian soul that the great philosopher would have loved. More importantly, Olsen, and the novel, understand what Nietzsche meant about the scary business of looking into the abyss.”

“A fine and daring writer.”

“A riveting, witty, and empathetic exploration of a fascinating mind, and beautifully written.”

“This Philip K. Dick Award nominee continues Olsen’s, and Dick’s, tradition of exploring human consciousness, sometimes in delightful and surprising ways.”

“Kisses, tears, and laughter. Pride, embarrassment, and humiliation. Lance Olsen’s beautiful novel gives us both the “human, all too human” side of Nietzsche, and the dream of lightness and grace that was central to his philosophy, but that is too often forgotten or ignored by his disciples.”

“Lance Olsen is a writer whose technical ingenuity is matched only by his fertility of invention and compassion for his characters. His novel 10:01 illustrates all these qualities beautifully.”

“Walter Benjamin envisioned the underground Paris Arcades as the quintessential 19th century industrial dream space. In 10:01 Lance Olsen provides us with the Millennial version: the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, “large enough to contain seven Yankee Stadiums.” Each page headlines a different character or set of characters randomly flung together in a movie theater there in mid-afternoon. They interface (often freakishly) with each other; with the Mall’s blandishments; with the images on the screen; with their own fantasies. At the climax the theater and its inhabitants suddenly implode, perhaps out of the ultimate logic of late industrial capitalism. Or they don’t implode but are sucked irresistibly into the black hole of American make-believe. Olsen has written a cunningly original docufiction of the American psyche post-9/11 and perennial.”

“You’re sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Surround-Sound, Technicolor—this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen’s brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a projector beam.”

“All America comes to the Mall of America to settle in (or not) to one of its fourth floor theaters: to fantasize, to make their own films, to hide out, make out, freak out, speak out (to themselves, their cell phones, each other, their absent partners, to the world at large) in the voices of all America. In 10:01 these are the lost and lonely of Nathanael West’s Hollywood in The Day of the Locust, crammed together in one small, dark place where “everyone is working off a script he doesn’t have access to”; where, as in the movies, “life flies at us in bright splinters” and “reality feels so inadequate simply because you can’t look at it through a frame like you can a movie.” So caught up are these characters in the bizarre, fragmented, apocalyptic film of their own lives that they never get to the main feature, which is, of course, Lance Olsen’s fine, penetrating novel.”

“Imaginative … intelligent … thought-provoking.”

“Olsen’s writing is always sharp and vibrant.”

“Smart and moving and elegant.”

“Lance olsen has composed a spare parable of representation and self, the loss of the real and the reality of loss. Girl Imagined by Chance is smart and moving and elegant, its seemingly offhand scenes as effortlessly poignant as a handful of old snapshots.”

“Trapped between reproductions and reality and partaking of the consolations and terrors of both, the central couple of Girl Imagined by Chance makes a snap decision that ends up establishing a second, private, unreal life for them. but, Olsen suggests, there is no clean distinction between life and imagination—some of one’s most satisfying moments are those which are the least real to others. A marvelous book that quietly says more about reality and imagination than the much flashier hyperbooks currently in vogue.”

“Like the images scattered throughout its pages, Lance Olsen’s extraordinary Girl Imagined by Chance is composed of a cunning series of multi-tonal cubist squares, rectangles, triangles, and quadrangles, shot through with bright white vertical and horizontal thrusts. Olsen’s novel—for which David Markson, Roland Barthes, and Mary Shelley might stand as precursors—is both a treatise on sight and the haunting vagaries of perception and a moving tale of the loss of a girl who has never quite been.”

“Edgy, angular, these intricate narrative-pictorials fizz in that most anxiety-saturated space for high art, where the word and image meet easily and breezily on the bubbling rim of genre.”

“An exhilarating, high octane performance . . . consistently inventive–at once frenzied and furious and tender.”

“An extremely subtle, complex, and rigorous investigation into a set of related themes hovering around TV and death. Sewing Shut My Eyes is constantly exploring, with great rigor, wit, brilliance, and invention, how this folding screen actually folds. Andi Olsen’s visuals . . . take the coverlet off and assault the reader with the dream nation’s reptile brain.”

“A treat for anyone interested in the place of the human will in a society that seeks at every turn to remove and commodify our memories and selves, turning us all into isolated units locked inside a building, dreaming dreams that were, and never will be, truly ours.”

“A wonderfully funny, definitely unusual SF novel. . . . Witty prose, outrageous situations, a healthy sense of the absurd and genuinely entertaining writing prevail in this unique look into one of the less obvious side alleys of speculative fiction.”

“A funny cautionary tale.”

“Relentless, savage, hysterically funny. . . . With his amped-up language and massive powers of invention, Olsen succeeds in tattooing his future on your hide.”

“One of the best of 1996.”

“[Olsen] quickly and clearly creates historical and theoretical frames and then uses them to support analyses of the novel, adding detail to detail and connection to connection until the intellectual ante is raised.”

“Reminiscent of the British New Wave Movement at its best.”

“In Scherzi, I Believe, we get the full range of Olsen’s craft and decidedly unsullen art, a kind of Whitman sampler of fictions, each selection different, but all filled with humor, dazzle, and a reality that realism seldom achieves. . . . Here is a collection to water a parched place with laughter, delight, and that rarest of commodities as we approach the third millennium: intelligence.”

“Scherzi, I Believe . . . is a series of five-finger exercises, fables, urban legends, prose poems, anecdotes/aphorisms, experimental pieces and exercises in magical realism, many of which are set in a kind of quiet suburban hell filled with scenes of manic domesticity, stories which often revolve around invasions of the fantastic, the bizarre, into the everyday.”

“Brilliant black comedy.”

“The ultimate rock’n’roll novel.”

“Olsen is one of the liveliest critics writing today . . . . [William Gibson] is a revealing and rewarding study. . . . an essential book for everyone interested in the movement which revolutionized science fiction over the last decade.”

“This story is an outstanding portrait of human interaction on an emotional and visceral level. It is often absurd, sometimes disturbing, and wholly engrossing . . . . [An] excellent piece of contemporary fiction.”

“Radiant.”

“Circus of the Mind in Motion is an elegant and informed analysis of postmodern fiction and the forms that are shaping its comic vision within the labyrinths of language and experience.”

“The greatest strengths of Ellipse of Uncertainty are eclecticism and intellectual stimulation. It is rare in these days of the densely argued monograph and the abstruse theoretical tome to be taken on so pleasurable a switchback ride through some of the more (and the less) well-known postmodernist texts. . . . An intellectually invigorating book.”