NEWS: Bridge Books Announces First Title in New Literary Fiction Line: Stacy Hardy’s “An Archaeology of Holes”
NEWS
Bridge Books Announces First Title in New Literary Fiction Line: Stacy Hardy’s An Archaeology of Holes
AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOLES WILL BE RELEASED NOV. 3, 2023 WITH EVENTS TO BE ANNOUNCED
Bridge Books, publisher of the Bridge Journal, a division of Bridge Art Nfp, the registered Illinois 501 (c) 3 not for profit organization that also publishes the weekly online Bridge magazine at bridge-chicago.org, today announces publication of its first literary fiction title. Acquired and edited for the press by Bridge Journal Fiction Section Editor Meghan Lamb, the story collection will be released by Bridge Books Nov. 3, 2023.
Written by Stacy Hardy, An Archaeology of Holes is an excavation and an evisceration of love, loneliness, alienation and what it means to be human. Working between fabulism, dark realism and autofiction, these stories propose the creative and liberatory possibilities of holes, which are everywhere: in bodies, in the ransacked earth, in erased lives and memories, in forgotten loves and lovers and the endless massacres. In this hallucinatory journey, you can just as easily autopsy your own corpse, live inside a cow, foment a revolt of migrant workers, discover a fallen empire at the bottom of a wasteland, engage in the traffic of exotic sea-lice, explore a black hole by digging in your garden, or be present on the day when all the white people finally walk into the sea.
“It’s a manuscript that was headhunted then turned down by a major publisher,” states Hardy, “who described reading it as akin to ‘floating in amniotic fluid.’ I always thought that should be the blurb! It was then picked up by Rot-Bo-Krik, a new small French press who published it in a beautiful translation by Elisabeth Malaquais and Jean-Baptiste Naudy in May 2022 - so French readers got the first taste. I’m thrilled it’s now out in the English original, via Bridge Books.”
“The stories within An Archaeology of Holes are so often my touchstones when exposing students to innovative points of view and their possibilities,” says Bridge Journal Fiction & Books Acquisition Editor Meghan Lamb, “how point of view is shaped not only by characters, but by the spaces they occupy. With singular, defamiliarizing language, An Archaeology of Holes is a master study in the ways space drives both narrative and readerly perspective. Hardy’s work disturbs, contorts, and ultimately re-invents the reader’s understanding of what space can mean: from the subterranean vantage of a buried corpse to the lugubrious interior of a cow’s body.”
About Stacy Hardy
Stacy Hardy is a writer, researcher and editor whose work explores the intersections of embodiment, the individual, and society. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies and journals including the New Orleans Review, New Contrasts, The Evergreen Review, Black Sun Lit and many more. Her first short fiction collection, Because the Night, was published by Pocko, London in 2015, and An Archaeology of Holes, was released in translation by Rot-Bo-Krik in France in 2022. Her plays and librettos have been performed globally. Hardy is also a lecturer in creative writing, an editor at pan-African platform Chimurenga, a partner in African creative writing teaching initiative Saseni, and a founder of Ukuthula, a project that develops new writing from and against gender-based violence. She is currently a visiting fellow at The University of Chicago, where she is collaborating with anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan, poet Daniel Borzutzky, and musician Neo Muyanga to build “breathing machines,” new multi-and-interdisciplinary forms and forums for the expression of collectivity through the act of conspiring together.
View the full press release here.
