A stylistically dazzling dystopian novel about things, people, and the forces and seams between them.
In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it won’t stop snowing, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What compels a passing witness to this event to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it? The Box follows a delicate yet impenetrable rectangle as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Six narrators, each with a distinct voice, give accounts of different junctures in the box’s life. From a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection to a couple who own an antiquarian bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers repeat rumours and rely on faulty memories, grasping at an object that continually escapes them. Haunting all their varied recollections is one mysterious woman who, convinced of either the box’s value or malevolence, pursues it with deadly desperation.
A stylistically dazzling dystopian novel about things, people, and the forces and seams between them.
In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it won’t stop snowing, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What compels a passing witness to this event to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it? The Box follows a delicate yet impenetrable rectangle as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Six narrators, each with a distinct voice, give accounts of different junctures in the box’s life. From a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection to a couple who own an antiquarian bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers repeat rumours and rely on faulty memories, grasping at an object that continually escapes them. Haunting all their varied recollections is one mysterious woman who, convinced of either the box’s value or malevolence, pursues it with deadly desperation.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Sep 19, 2023 |
| Specifications | 248 pages | 5.5 in x 8.25 in |
| Keywords | social collapse; experimental writing; saha; cho nam joo; magical realism; social horror; psychological thriller; clifi; climate change; bermudian literature; |
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Supporting Resources
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
MANDY-SUZANNE WONG is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her works include the novel Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House, 2019); the essay collection Listen, we all bleed (New Rivers Press, 2021); and the chapbooks Awabi and Artificial Wilderness. Her work has appeared in Arcturus, Black Warrior Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy, Island Review, and Necessary Fiction, and has won recognition in the Best of the Net, Aeon Award, and Eyelands Flash Fiction competitions. |
| Written By |
|
MANDY-SUZANNE WONG is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her works include the novel Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House, 2019); the essay collection Listen, we all bleed (New Rivers Press, 2021); and the chapbooks Awabi and Artificial Wilderness. Her work has appeared in Arcturus, Black Warrior Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy, Island Review, and Necessary Fiction, and has won recognition in the Best of the Net, Aeon Award, and Eyelands Flash Fiction competitions. |
Delivers something rare, evoking a creepy sort of glamour around books and stories, as if craving a good read is itself sometimes a form of dark desire.
” —KirkusA feast of knotty sentences … Fans of experimental fiction ought to check this out.
” —Publishers WeeklyThe Box is an extraordinary novel, gamesome and philosophical. Not since Borges have I experienced fiction as a perfect maze or puzzle, endlessly pleasing. The reader enters it, fascinated, just as s/he goes out into the snow, which is always falling. Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a writer to watch.
” —Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night and IndelicacyMandy-Suzanne Wong’s bold, singular, and brilliant novel is so strange, so enigmatic, it’s nearly impossible to describe. In an unnamed city with unending snow, a tiny box falls from a stranger's pocket. From there the reader is bestowed with an array of different narrators and situations: art galleries, pawnshops, antiquarian bookshops. By turns funny and profound, The Box is a feat of language and storytelling and, in the end, a revelation.
” —Mark Haber, author of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss and Reinhardt’s GardenIf one of César Aira’s sly, sophisticated fictions took a detour through Jane Bennett’s theory of vibrant matter, the result might look something like The Box. At once a detective story, a meditation on art in the Anthropocene, and a speculative encounter with the liveliness of things, Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s startling novel is literature for our times.
” —Sofia Samatar, author of The White Mosque and TenderWong's limpid, precise prose has a nineteenth century vibe, while her focus, an inanimate object, could not be more contemporary. Riveting and elegant, The Box brings to mind Kazuo Ishiguro at his most enigmatic.
” —Daisy Rockwell, author of Taste, translator of Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree