Parallax
She inspected her knitting. “A yarn imagines itself, you know,” she murmured,” from separate strands. Every story is made of strands, too, of worlds that keep unfolding simultaneously along the same yarn. You can spot one at a time or, rarely, a multitude swarming—though no yarner can ever glimpse both the individual tale and the swarm at the same moment. Imagination can conceal while it reveals. Sooner or later, though, everything gets used.”
In Parallax, Robin Morgan’s most radiant prose, spare but sensuous, welcomes you into her dazzling imagination. This is a story about storytelling––a set of shorter tales which, like Russian dolls, nest and fit together to reveal a larger one.
A fable for the future, a prediction about the past, Parallax is a luscious story that enfolds you and demands immediate rereading the moment you finish, a story that surprises you and invites you to play with the patterns inside its paradoxes, a story whose characters will accompany you for the rest of your life.
2019 | ISBN 9781925581959 | Paperback | 232 x 154 mm | 192 pp
Endorsements
I read it because I started it and did not want to stop. The more I read, the more I did not want to stop. I loved the mixture of frame and stories . . . the good-natured tone, the wit, the generosity. This is vintage Morgan.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Watch an interview with Robin Morgan on Pix11
Listen to Robin Morgan read from Parallax here.
Reviews
I really enjoyed this Parallax. I loved the timeless folktale feel of the stories, and the wonderful evocation of the lives of Monarch butterflies, and the quiet, domestic humility and contradictions of The Yarner and the stranger. I cannot pretend to know how to definitively explain the “meaning” of all of the stories Parallax contains, but I think this is the point. They are stories about learning to see enormity and complexity and striving to arrive at a balanced perspective on all the world’s shiftiness and change. It is a book that will surely make readers think, but is also a tale told masterfully: full of hooks and needles.
— Daniela Brozek Cordier, Plumwood Mountain
Reader Reviews
FIVE STARS. An elegant, intelligent and imaginative novel about storytelling, told as tales within tales, many of which read like fables, others as warnings, and all of them undercut with warmth, generosity and wit.
—Sally Piper Author, GoodReads ReviewFIVE STARS. What a lovely book - full of stories and fables, all with depth, understanding and wit. It is the kind of book that I will be reading again and again - there are so many moments that have a depth of understanding that need to be revisited and contemplated.
—Hannah Wattangeri, GoodReads ReviewFIVE STARS. I love Ursula K Le Guin's endorsement for this book which is published by Spinifex Press. "I read it because I started it and did not want to stop. The more I read, the more I did not want to stop. I loved the mixture of frame and stories . . . the good-natured tone, the wit, the generosity. This is vintage Morgan." This book is a journey. Why not join Robin Morgan for the ride?
—Rachael McDiarmid, GoodReads Review
