The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

Praise for The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far by Quintan Ana Wikswo (Coffee House Press/June 2015) “Wikswo’s singular lines strike like the tone of a bell, resonating across pages . . . The stories . . . take the reader on a journey where myth, mystery, and the impossible have never seemed more real. In these stories, author and visual artist Wikswo juxtaposes dreamy, surreal prose with shadowed, ambiguous, occluded dreamscapes to haunting effect. Her stories defy narrative and instead take the reader on a journey where myth, mystery, and the impossible have never seemed more real – heady, euphoric, and full with loss.” —Publishers Weekly 

“Each of the 10 stories in the collection feels crafted into a distinctive object and thoughtfully presented, practically hung on a wall for the audience’s contemplation. This makes for an unconventional reading experience that is as visual as it is verbal. . . in Wikswo’s book, the text and paratext are equally deliberate and interesting, and are, as befits a cross-genre artist, difficult to separate.” —The Chicago Tribune

“There’s an art to the arrangement of words and images in “The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far,” Quintan Ana Wikswo’s new collection. It’s more than the way authors like W.G. Sebald, Jesse Ball and Teju Cole have used photographs to punctuate and accentuate the narratives they write; there’s a sense of collage here, of the images being used to state things where words no longer suffice…In this mysterious work, Wikswo has found a new way to dramatize historical horrors and ambiguities.”—The Star Tribune

“The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, from Coffee House Press, is a collection of stories and photographs that reads and feels like a dream map of a visionary’s brain. It is unlike anything else out there. The stories breathe with peripheral intensity. Upon reading them, one can feel how far and how deep they reach back and forward, what and whose stories they are trying to un-erase. Combined with the photographs – taken with broken cameras – the text begins to sneak into different places of the brain and back again. There is a rhythm to this movement, a music, a life. The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far may change the way you view the book as object, the story as word. – Warscapes

“Wikswo’s writing’s emotional power, coupled with a fantastical, dreamlike quality underscored with darkness and a fixation on mortality, gives her prose a cinematic nature evocative of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman. Wikswo’s interest in the transformative function of writing is less in the product and more the act; how, in a Blanchotian sense, we lose something of ourselves in writing that cannot be regained, and how this mirrors the experience of love.” – Bookslut

“In this evocative new short story collection, Quintan Ana Wikswo proves herself unafraid of the depths. Like shortwave radio dispatches from another Universe where the edges that separate us are constantly blurring and shifting, in the first few pages of Quintan Ana Wikswo’s debut story collection, The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, you might wonder where you are. You might wonder where you’re going. You might, if you’re the type of reader who likes to be certain about your time and place in space, have to tell yourself to relax. You might have to sit tight and be patient with the unknowing. I promise you it will be worth it.”—Lambda Literary

“One of Brooklyn’s most engaging artistic and literary voices.” – Greenlight Books

“There’s a mesmerizing sense of timespace travel in these stories, which seem to simultaneously inhabit ancient mythological eras and the present day.”—LitHub

“[The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far] blends stark prose and shifting imagery with images that sometimes accentuate the words on the page and sometimes bring moments into sharp (pardon the pun) focus. It’s unlike anything else you’re likely to read this year.”—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“For a society recently focused on how rigidly we should adhere to the identities that are supposed to define us, Quintan Ana Wikswo’s new book of photography and stories comes as a spiritual guide.”—Creative Capital

“Although the foundation of the book is her sparkling prose, the accompanying visual art is just as integral to the story, itself a meditation on the discomfort of ‘painfully restrictive Newtonian physics’ and the quest to escape the torments of human desire by finding solace in a parallel universe.”—LA Weekly

“A multi-sensory reading experience. You don’t just read the stories; you engage with them . . . It is through Wikswo’s poetic language and movement that we can recognize, live, and exist in our own ecology of complexity.”—Electric Literature 

“The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far is the acclaimed new book of words and images by Quintan Ana Wikswo, an artist and writer who has never limited herself to only one medium and certainly not to two dimensions.”—LA Weekly

“Quintan Ana Wikswo’s short story collection The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far boldly combines prose and photography to create a unique, mesmerizing, and unforgettable reading experience.”—Largehearted Boy

“When Brooklyn-based author, visual artist, photographer and filmmaker Quintan Ana Wikswo celebrates the release of her new book The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, you can be sure that the former human rights activist won’t settle for a simple reading and Q&A.”—Bedford + Bowery

“Wikswo is equally deft with words and photographs . . . Wikswo’s desire to reintroduce the reader to an intense level of natural vitality . . . is not so much an attempt to erase the modern but to restore something ancient and eternal to its rightful place.”—Vertigo

“Dedicated to those inhabiting the meeting point of nihilism and romance, Wikswo’s tales palpate the tiny, tender parts of us that dare to hope for love and belonging in the face of a cold and unkind universe . . . Blurring the edges of reality and challenging the body’s limits, Wikswo offers a glimpse of what could transpire if our deepest desires devoured us.”—Bookslut

The stories breathe with peripheral intensity. . . . There is a rhythm to this movement, a music, a life. The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far may change the way you view the book as object, the story as word.”—Warscapes

“[The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far explores] humanity from the outside, not just crossing genres but exploding them. Quintan combines text and photography to give us characters who have left their bodies, and whose stories have become boundless. She writes with both a lightness and the weight of lives unlived, of remorse, and of loss.”—0s&1s

“These stunning, solitary and cinematic letters to the self (think of the Quays and Béla Tarr speaking together in dreamtime) bear witness to a world beloved and betrayed, the spent and brutal collisions of irretrievable loss with what might have been possible.”—Rikki Ducornet

“Quintan Ana Wikswo, in her unique and magnificent The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, has ignited an extraordinary condensation of texts and images that culls together spirit, compassion, and dreams. Throughout her foray into extensions of the mind and the limits of the body she exudes an uncanny power of magic and wizardry.”—Lynn Hershman Leeson, Director of Women Art Revolution

“You will find within these pages a marvelous alchemy of image and text, all of it radiant, sensual, endlessly layered. The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far is at once a seduction and an insurrection: a paean to lovers, explorers, resisters, and those without borders.”—National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Madeleine is Sleeping

 

Quintan Ana Wikswo
The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us this Far
Stories & Photographs
Coffee House Press | June 2015
Purchase the book on Coffee House Press or Amazon

When love, lust, and longing have all but killed you, and Newtonian physics has become too painfully restrictive, is it possible to find freedom in another dimension? Have you lost the will to live, or have you lost the will to live as human? In these stories, characters must learn to live with unmarked edges and meanings that can no longer be defined.

Check the Calendar for complete book tour dates:
NYC: June 11th, 2015 @6pm / Howl Happening / 6 East 1st St  / INVITE
LA: June 23rd, 2015 @7pm / Monk Space / 4414 W 2nd St / INVITE
SF: June 25th, 2015 @7:30pm / Green Apple Books / 1231 9th Ave / INVITE
BROOKLYN: July 7th @ 7:30pm / Greenlight Books

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ARTIST STATEMENT

I grew up as the child of a preacher and a physicist, each of whom told me creation stories in an attempt to justify what they’d attempted through my conception. Their stories were perplexingly parallel yet divergent – atoms versus Adam, states of matter, heaven and hell, charged particles, good and evil. I came to realize that the experience of passing in and out of existence is an uneasy one, with no answers, only theories. Unconvinced by their explanations, I concluded I was likely not a human child, and unbound by their rules, I began to create my own.

I started HOPE OF FLOATING in the Baltic in 2010, while traveling through Estonia, Finland, Latvia, eastern Russia, and my ancestral terrain – what is now Lithuania. This part of the world offers a tangible collision between the  ancient pagan and post-Soviet pantheons…especially the vestiges of roadside shrines and decommissioned cold war military installations. This offered a marvelously painful and poetic soil in which to plant my existential questions.

Since then, I continue to expand the works to include additional series of poems and short stories, photographs, films, and live performance collaborations with composers, especially Veronika Krausas, a fellow Lithuanian.