The Plotinus

Incarcerated for his subversive connection to the old, living world, a prisoner makes the most of his isolation in this captivating allegorical tale about tyranny, conviction, and the enduring power of imagination.

Upon setting out for a morning walk with his knobby stick in hand, a young man is arrested by a robot called the Plotinus and abandoned in a cell where one beam of sunlight beckons through an air duct. Rapping his knuckles against the vent to relay his tale of woe in code, he recalls his lost love and their group’s forbidden activities; his readings in philosophy and the sciences; and sweet memories of freedom’s small pleasures. As the captive confronts his increasingly dire circumstances with rigorous optimism, the appearance of fantastical visitors and miraculous objects in his cell further blurs the line between hallucination and dystopian reality. Told with uncanny warmth and intellectual brio, The Plotinus is Rikki Ducornet’s most unforgettable story yet. 

Publication date: July 11, 2023

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 4.5 x 7

Page count: 88 pages

ISBN: 9781566896818

Rikki Ducornet is a transdisciplinary artist. Her work is animated by an interest in nature, Eros, tyranny, and the transcendent capacities of the creative imagination. She is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and artist, and her fiction has been translated into fifteen languages. Her art has been exhibited internationally, most recently with Amnesty International’s traveling exhibit I Welcome, focused on the refugee crisis. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College, the Prix Guerlain, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Her novel The Jade Cabinet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

“Dashingly absurd. . . . Ducornet’s latest is replete with figures that represent mankind in all its vainglorious hubris to great comedic effect while echoing the familiar sorrow of humanity’s severance from, and ultimate destruction of, the natural world that gives us both our meaning and our memories. It is a surreal novel that, nonetheless, feels disconcertingly real. . . . An inscrutable wonder of a book that rewards a reader’s attention with its own returned gaze.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“When all the beauty left in a denuded world is concentrated in the delicate body of a visiting hornet, what else is there for a narrator (or for us) to do but love her. So The Plotinus shows us. This book is elegant, hilarious, ominous, and transcendent.”

—Rae Armantrout

“So new, so strange. . . . It enthralled me.”

—Forrest Gander