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The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

Stories by Quintan Ana Wikswo
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In these stories, characters defy the limits of physics to escape the all too human pain of love and loss.

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.

Publication date: June 9, 2015

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 277 pages

ISBN: 9781566894050

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Quintan Ana Wikswo’s work appears regularly in Tin House, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Denver Quarterly, among other publications. She has received residencies and fellowships in literature, visual art, film, and performance at Yaddo, Djerassi, Creative Capital, Center for Cultural Innovation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, and the NEA. In 2013, the Berlin Jewish Museum presented a five-month solo exhibition of her project Sonderbauten, which explores state-sponsored sexual violence against women through photographs, poetry installation, and film. A former human rights worker, she is now the co-Director of Contos & Wikswo, an arts organization creating artworks in literature, visual art, performance, and ritual in communities with complex ecologies of memory, history, mystery, and mythos.

“The text and paratext are equally deliberate and interesting, and are, as befits a cross-genre artist, difficult to separate.” 

The Chicago Tribune

“In this mysterious work, Wikswo has found a new way to dramatize historical horrors and ambiguities.” 

The Star Tribune

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

Literary Hub

“Desire bends the world with transmogrifying persistence in Wikswo’s debut collection, . . . until the reality we thought we knew erodes into the background of a whorling landscape rife with longing.” 

—The Rumpus

“Quintan Ana Wikswo accomplishes places of uncommon depth via an elixir of language, photography, and negative space.” 

The Los Angeles Review

“An intoxicating read that feels at once universal and personal, comforting and jarring, ethereal and earthy.” 

Electric Literature

“It’s unlike anything else you’re likely to read this year.” 

Vol. 1 Brooklyn

The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us this Far occupies territory the way only the bravest literary works do: the characters and places within shirk boundaries and create new ones, exist both inside and outside the world as we know it, and redefine love and existence in an unexpected and wildly queer way.” 

Lambda Literary

“A kind of alchemy is at work here within Wikswo’s sensual writing. Writing that comes close to being felt bodily and brightly heard. . . . A magnificent work.” 

Review 31

“What is written here moves somewhere between a personal letter and a myth digested by generations. The stories are site-specific, witchy, and precise.” 

The Diagram

“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.” 

Bookslut

“The stories breathe with peripheral intensity. . . . There is a rhythm to this movement, a music, a life.” 

Warscapes

“These stunning, solitary and cinematic letters to the self 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 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.”

—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

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