Trafik

A novel by Rikki Ducornet April 13, 2021 • 5 x 7.5 • 112 pages • 978-1-56689-606-1 From the singularly inventive mind of Rikki Ducornet, Trafik is a buoyant voyage through outer space and inner longing, transposing human experiences of passion, loss, and identity into a post-Earth universe. Quiver, a mostly-human astronaut, takes refuge from the monotony of harvesting minerals on remote asteroids by running through a virtual reality called the Lights, chasing visions of an elusive red-haired beauty. Her high-strung robot partner, Mic, pilots their Wobble and entertains himself by surfing the records of the obliterated planet Earth stored on his Swift Wheel for Al Pacino trivia, recipes for reconstituted sushi, and high fashion trends. But when an accident destroys their cargo, Quiver and Mic go rogue, setting off on a madcap journey through outer space toward an idyllic destination: the planet Trafik. About the Author 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. Praise for Trafik “In a future where all that's left of Earth are the records of random trivia, a human-ish astronaut and her robot companion decide to abandon their mission. . . . On this journey, the two will confront the biggest questions about existence, identity, and experience: What makes a human? Where does consciousness reside? It could all become very serious, if Ducornet weren't so skilled in absurdity.” —Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed “Illustrative of the dream logic of surrealist novels, Nadja, Hopscotch, or Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. All in all, the result is essential Ducornet, obscure and extravagant. This space operetta shouts like Ubu Roi. Ducornet delivers a fascinating addition to her incredible practice. A Jupiter fuse against the void.” —Joseph Houlihan, Chicago Review of Books “A winsome space picaresque in which surreality piles upon surreality. . . . A longtime master of the extraordinary sentence, Ducornet has outdone herself here, blending SF’s penchant for invented jargon with her own queer linguistic egalitarianism . . . in a primordial soup of possibility. This slender book captivates with its ferocious curiosity, quick wit, and ultimately tender generosity. Carried along by the bumptious rollick of its language, this tale is full of sound and fury, signifying literally everything.” —Kirkus, starred review "Ducornet dazzles with this whirlwind jaunt through a far-future universe, told in jargon-studded prose that turns gonzo science into gleeful lyricism. . . . Ducornet remains a fantastic stylist." —Publishers Weekly “I loved this mind-bending little trek across the universe. Thoroughly delightful, poignant, funny, and sweet, like if Italo Calvino wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a series of pointed vignettes, it’s the perfect amount of quarantine-relatable loneliness and existential spiraling, combined with escapism and optimism. It’s like watching a dream come true." —Harvard Book Store for BuzzFeed “A highly literate science-fiction quest narrative, a twenty-first-century version of Calvino's Cosmicomics. . . . Trafik is a compact singularity that explodes in a Big Bang of creativity." —James Crossley, Madison Books “A perfectly strange and surreal book, dreamlike and fun.” —Sarah Cassavant, Subtext Books “Surrealism meets space opera in Trafik, Rikki Ducornet’s startlingly original look at a post-human and non-human pairing wandering through space while obsessed with the scattered fragments of a world they never knew. At once funny and absurd, Trafik peers at our own time through the lens of the future to reveal what we should regret losing and what would be better gone.” —Brian Evenson Praise for Brightfellow “Ms. Ducornet’s novel about a man who ‘cannot fathom the bottomless secret of his own existence’ casts a lingering spell.” —The New York Times “In tracing the shape of what is left behind, Ducornet lends dignity to the universal plight of vanished illusions.” —Los Angeles Times “Bursting with vivid imagery, beautiful language, heartbreaking characters. . . . Ducornet’s tale is unique and captivating.” —Booklist “A portrait of a surreal community that defies easy categorization. . . . An endless delight at the sentence level.” —Kirkus “Ducornet has written the oddest of varsity novels, one that anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence.” —Publishers Weekly Praise for Rikki Ducornet “Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope.” —The New York Times “Linguistically explosive. . . . One of the most interesting American writers around.” —The Nation “Pick up a book by the award-winning Ducornet, and you know it will be startling, elegant, and perfectly formed.” —Library Journal “Storytelling that enchants the senses.” —The Boston Globe “Ducornet is a writer of extraordinary power, in whose books ‘rigor and imagination’ (her watchwords) perform with the grace and daring of high-wire acrobats.” —BOMB “Ducornet’s is a world of surfaces so rich and textured that notions of meaning and interpretation are subsumed under a lush and seductive prose that eventually inhabits readers’ minds.” —The Millions “[R]eveals strangeness in the most basic circumstances of life, flooding them in new light.” —Kenyon Review “Ducornet is a mad maestro of words.” —Seattle Weekly “Writer, poet, and artist Ducornet does things with words most authors would never even dream of.” —Men’s Journal "Rikki Ducornet is a magic sensualist, a writer's writer, a master of language, a unique voice." —Amy Tan “It is Rikki Ducornet’s magic to be able to coax an entire universe—‘restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence’—out of the modest and often grim contours of one man’s life.” —Kathryn Davis “Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet’s passionate, caring, and accomplished career. Its readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon's knife. And the rendering? The rendering is as good as it gets.” —William Gass “Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.” —Joanna Scott “Rikki Ducornet is imagination's emissary to this mundane world.” —Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books