Fanny Howe Books

The conclusion of a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, resistance, and poverty. First published by Semiotexte in 2001, Indivisible concludes a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, wonder, resistance, and poverty. Depicting the tempestuous multiracial world of artists and activists who lived in working-class Boston during the 1960s, Indivisible begins when its narrator, Henny, locks her husband in a closet so that she might better discuss things with God. On the verge of a religious conversion, Henny attempts to make peace with the dead by telling their stories.

Set against the backdrop of the early 1960s counter-culture, this early novel by Fanny Howe follows a dispossessed young woman deeply influenced by a childhood friend. Her journey from the East to the West Coast of the USA becomes a desperate attempt to escape her past and reinvent herself, ultimately leading to tragedy. The narrative explores themes of identity, friendship, and the quest for belonging in a rapidly changing society.

The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? 'Let the best one win.' War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It's so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted.Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don't identify yourself with your description of yourself

"The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth takes the side of the young--boys and girls, doomed and saved--as they weave their ways through ancient and modern times. The Boston Marathon bombers, Francis and Clare of Assisi, legendary nymphs, and urban nomads occupy this sequence of essays, poems, and tales, their stories and chronologies shifting and overlapping."--Back cover.

"A collage of essays on childhood, language, spiritual biographies, and the writer's life, 'a vocation has no name'"--P. [4] of cover.

"NIGHT PHILOSOPHY is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn't matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist, and the victim-perpetrator model controls citizens."-- Provided by publisher