Arte Six/Reading: "Mortal Love" July 1, 2004

"Arte Six" listing:
Reading/Signing, "Mortal Love"

Catch her before the KGB does...

Rare chance to meet literary fantasist Elizabeth Hand, before her KGB Bar reading late this year.

She will be reading from her new book, "Mortal Love".

About this book: "Mortal Love" isn't so much a decadent novel as a Symbolist novel; not a book about the thing but the thing itself. Algernon Swinburne is a supporting character, and really upstages everyone else when he's around. The central female figure is a sort of avatar of the White Goddess; at least that's how mortals see her: her true nature is something else entirely..."
(Hand comments on her book, "Mortal Love")

Pre-reviews: PRINT
- Starred review, Editor's Pick, Publisher's Weekly
- Starred review, Kirkus

- "Hand explores the theme of artistic inspiration and its dangerous devolvement into obsession and madness through three interwoven narrative threads in this superb dark fantasy novel."
(Publisher's Weekly)

"'Mortal Love' contains numerous echoes of A.S. Byatt's Possession and Peter Straub's "Ghost Story," but it's an original work of considerable sensuous force - thanks to entertaining cameo appearances by amusingly libidinous and hysterical poet A.C. Swinburne and truculent historian-folklorist Lady Wilde..."
(Kirkus review)

- "What connects these men -- and others whose grand destinies are to imagine and create -- is one woman. Eternal, unknowable, the very ideal of beauty and desirability, she exists somewhere beyond the boundaries of time, a sensuous dream of flesh and fantasy to inspire or destroy, an immortal lover ... or an angel of death."
(HarperCollins review)

- "A wonderfully Gothic atmosphere, with lush visual imagery and rich poetic language."
(Library Journal)

Pre-reviews: AUTHORS
- Peter Straub
- John Crowley
- James Reese
- Kelly Link

"I think she has written the best book of her generation."
(Peter Straub)

"Don?t turn the pages too fast?if you can help it."
(John Crowley)

"A great gothic read, and one that dishes up all the dark delights."
(James Reese, author of "The Book of Shadows")

"You don?t so much read this novel as drink it down, like absinthe."
(Kelly Link)

Pre-reviews: BLOGS
- "I have been reading a galley of Liz Hand's extraordinary forthcoming novel MORTAL LOVE, and suddenly felt the need to tell the entire world: THIS IS ONE ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY AMAZING BOOK."
(http://lagringa.blogspot.com, via blogosphere book site http://www.allconsuming.net)

About this author:

- Read an in-depth interview with Elizabeth Hand, in the latest issue of "Arte Six":
http://www.sashasoren.com/newsletter.htm
http://artesix.blogspot.com

- Visit Hand's official site, "Winterlong":
http://www.elizabethhand.com

Get more info/B&N/Astor Place: 212-420-1322