Of course, each thing has its own sides to every story.
In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, 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, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it?
The Box follows an impenetrable rectangular cuboid as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give secondhand accounts of decisive moments in the box's life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection, from 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 something that continually escapes them. Haunting their recollections in one mysterious woman who, convinced of the box's good or evil powers, pursues it with deadly desperation.
In this mesmerizing, intricately constructed puzzle of a novel, Mandy-Suzanne Wong challenges our understanding of subject and objects, of cause and effect. Is it only humans who have agency? What is or isn't animate? What do we value and what do we discard?
Of course, each thing has its own sides to every story.
In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, 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, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it?
The Box follows an impenetrable rectangular cuboid as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give secondhand accounts of decisive moments in the box's life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection, from 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 something that continually escapes them. Haunting their recollections in one mysterious woman who, convinced of the box's good or evil powers, pursues it with deadly desperation.
In this mesmerizing, intricately constructed puzzle of a novel, Mandy-Suzanne Wong challenges our understanding of subject and objects, of cause and effect. Is it only humans who have agency? What is or isn't animate? What do we value and what do we discard?
| 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 WeeklyWong displays formidable skill … drawing us into the highly wrought maze of her novel and making it fun.
” —New York TimesEndlessly creative and inventive ... Perfectly crafted writing.
” —White Wall ReviewThe 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