Overview

"* Winner of the Sator New Works Award. * New York Public Library's ""Best Books of 2022"" * Kirkus Reviews' ""Best Fiction Books of 2022"" * 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, Longlist. * ""A Most Anticipated Book"" --Lambda Literary, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Tor.com, The Chicago Review of Books, LGBTQReads, Ms. Magazine, The Mary Sue My Volcano is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a menagerie of characters, as they each undergo personal eruptions, while the Earth itself is constantly shifting. Parable, myth, science-fiction, eco-horror, My Volcano is a radical work of literary art, emerging as a subversive, intoxicating artistic statement by John Elizabeth Stintzi. On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it's nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano. As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness. With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi."

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9781953387165

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Reviews

Winner of the Sator New Works Award The Sator New Works Award, selected by Two Dollar Radio editors, goes to an author who identifies as transgender or non-binary for a book-length work of fiction or non-fiction. This publishing prize was made possible by Sator Press, a nonprofit publishing company operated by Ken Baumann from 2009-2019. Climate change, time travel, startup culture, and volcanic eruptions intertwine in this sui generis outing from [Stintzi]... Told in a series of buzzing numbered fragments, the narrative whirls around a volcano rising in Central Park that looks like Mount Fuji. As the volcano grows, Stintzi builds out the wide-ranging narrative with jump cuts... That Stintzi keeps all these plates spinning is a wonder; that they transform the chaotic present into a fiery, transcendent vision of the future is even more impressive. It's a brilliant achievement. --Publishers Weekly, starred review With the panoramic scope and astute sharpness of Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes and the eerie chill of Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, John Elizabeth Stintzi's My Volcano immediately grabs you by the shirt and doesn't let you go. Structured like a spiral moving through time and space, and deftly mixing history and myth and vision with poetic prose, this dread-inducing book will keep you up at night until you get to its last devastating, but ultimately, I think, hopeful line. --Alicia Elliott, bestselling author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground A kaleidoscopic, contemporary folktale with added acerbic juice, like when Dylan went electric. Stintzi somehow funnels the tumultuous present into a sprawling novel of collision and connection that's both timely and timeless. This is very weird shit indeed. --Hazel Jane Plante, author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) My Volcano is a fast-paced, gripping, singular novel that belongs to the new wave of eco-horror yielding to no conventions. --Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig Praise for John Elizabeth Stintzi's Vanishing Monuments * Shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award The Best Canadian Fiction of 2020, CBC Books The Best of the Rest 2020, Ms. Magazine A surreal, poetic meditation on the struggle to feel at home with the past, family, and one's own body. --Kirkus, on Vanishing Monuments A melancholic and complicated story about grief, memory and identity, the novel is a beautiful and compulsive read, packed with themes and ideas that will resonate with many LGBTQ2 people. --Nour Abi Nakhoul, Xtra on Vanishing Monuments Add John Elizabeth Stintzi to the honour roll of artists who have taken up this compelling and fraught task in the hope that the forms and structures of art could somehow tame the painful chaos of experience or make it more intelligible. --Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun on Vanishing Monuments Vanishing Monuments is mystifying and rhapsodic in equal terms, resisting easy summations. Through the power of John Elizabeth Stintzi's language, it leaves a bittersweet impression.. --Ho Lin, Foreword Reviews on Vanishing Monuments Praise for John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat * Finalist for the Raymond Souster Award from the League of Canadian Poets. John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat is a work of immense gentleness. The care shown toward the authorial self, the past, and those within Stintzi's emotional sphere is like coming up for air from a culture ruled by nihilism... To the poetics of the queer everyday Stintzi adds their Junebat, a multitudinous concept of such explanatory power I'm certain it'll endure in the collective memory of Canadian letters. Read this impressive debut! --Billy-Ray Belcourt, award-winning author of This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms, and A History of My Brief Body John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat is a piercing examination of body, self, and the miraculous yet painful process of becoming. In this emotionally intimate, technically brilliant debut collection, Stintzi both opens a window to their own soul and holds a mirror to the reader's. Quietly powerful, Junebat is the kind of book that one comes back to over and over, to read and to dream about. --Kai Cheng Thom, award-winning author of A Place

Winner of the Sator New Works Award The Sator New Works Award, selected by Two Dollar Radio editors, goes to an author who identifies as transgender or non-binary for a book-length work of fiction or non-fiction. This publishing prize was made possible by Sator Press, a nonprofit publishing company operated by Ken Baumann from 2009-2019. Climate change, time travel, startup culture, and volcanic eruptions intertwine in this sui generis outing from [Stintzi]... Told in a series of buzzing numbered fragments, the narrative whirls around a volcano rising in Central Park that looks like Mount Fuji. As the volcano grows, Stintzi builds out the wide-ranging narrative with jump cuts... That Stintzi keeps all these plates spinning is a wonder; that they transform the chaotic present into a fiery, transcendent vision of the future is even more impressive. It's a brilliant achievement. --Publishers Weekly, starred review The chaos of current events takes on a supernatural dimension in John Elizabeth Stintzi's novel My Volcano. In the summer of 2016, all over the world, there are strange occurrences. The most spectacular event of all: a volcano sprouts in the middle of Central Park and keeps on growing, destroying large sections of New York City... My Volcano is a captivating novel about the consequences of letting obvious dangers fester and grow. --Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews, starred review A genre-bending novel that circles a volcano mysteriously rising from the Central Park Reservoir... Among the narrative sections, Stintzi intersperses the dates and victims of real-world violence in 2016, including the Pulse nightclub shooting and the shooting of Alton Sterling by police officers in Baton Rouge. At times, this ambitious novel can feel unwieldy, with its weighty subject matter and complex, formal innovation. However, Stintzi has a gift for meticulously crafted worldbuilding and captures the tender drama of human (and, in this novel, extrahuman) relationships. Patient readers will be rewarded by their arrival at the book's dazzling conclusion. A vibrant ecosystem of a novel that deals honestly with the beauty and horror of human and ecological connectedness. --Kirkus Reviews Nonbinary author Stintzi's science fiction / eco-horror novel is an ambitious, global tale that begins with the discovery of an emergent volcano in Central Park. An eclectic group of characters, from Mexico City, Tokyo, Nigeria, Greece, Mongolia, and more grapple with their personal changes and transformations as the earth undergoes its own. --Casey Stepaniuk, Autostraddle A volcano has formed in Central Park. A Mexican child finds himself in the wrong century. A nomad in Mongolia is transformed by a bee-sting. A trans writer in New Jersey imagines an impossible planet. In their second novel, poet and educator John Elizabeth Stintzi offers a globe-spanning and enigmatic romp through the strangeness of our world. --Andrew Woodrow-Butcher, Quill & Quire With the panoramic scope and astute sharpness of Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes and the eerie chill of Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, John Elizabeth Stintzi's My Volcano immediately grabs you by the shirt and doesn't let you go. Structured like a spiral moving through time and space, and deftly mixing history and myth and vision with poetic prose, this dread-inducing book will keep you up at night until you get to its last devastating, but ultimately, I think, hopeful line. --Alicia Elliott, bestselling author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground A kaleidoscopic, contemporary folktale with added acerbic juice, like when Dylan went electric. Stintzi somehow funnels the tumultuous present into a sprawling novel of collision and connection that's both timely and timeless. This is very weird shit indeed. --Hazel Jane Plante, author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) My Volcano is a fast-paced, gripping, singular novel that belongs to the new wave of eco-horror yielding to no conventions. --Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig Praise for John Elizabeth Stintzi's Vanishing Monuments * Shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award The Best Canadian Fiction of 2020, CBC Books The Best of the Rest 2020, Ms. Magazine A surreal, poetic meditation on the struggle to feel at home with the past, family, and one's own body. --Kirkus, on Vanishing Monuments A melancholic and complicated story about grief, memory and identity, the novel is a beautiful and compulsive read, packed with themes and ideas that will resonate with many LGBTQ2 people. --Nour Abi Nakhoul, Xtra on Vanishing Monuments Add John Elizabeth Stintzi to the honour roll of artists who have taken up this compelling and fraught task in the hope that the forms and structures of art could somehow tame the painful chaos of experience or make it more intelligible. --Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun on Vanishing Monuments Vanishing Monuments is mystifying and rhapsodic in equal terms, resisting easy summations. Through the power of John Elizabeth Stintzi's language, it leaves a bittersweet impression.. --Ho Lin, Foreword Reviews on Vanishing Monuments Praise for John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat * Finalist for the Raymond Souster Award from the League of Canadian Poets. John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat is a work of immense gentleness. The care shown toward the authorial self, the past, and those within Stintzi's emotional sphere is like coming up for air from a culture ruled by nihilism... To the poetics of the queer everyday Stintzi adds their Junebat, a multitudinous concept of such explanatory power I'm certain it'll endure in the collective memory of Canadian letters. Read this impressive debut! --Billy-Ray Belcourt, award-winning author of This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms, and A History of My Brief Body John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat is a piercing examination of body, self, and the miraculous yet painful process of becoming. In this emotionally intimate, technically brilliant debut collection, Stintzi both opens a window to their own soul and holds a mirror to the reader's. Quietly powerful, Junebat is the kind of book that one comes back to over and over, to read and to dream about. --Kai Cheng Thom, award-winning author of A Place

Winner of the Sator New Works Award The Sator New Works Award, selected by Two Dollar Radio editors, goes to an author who identifies as transgender or non-binary for a book-length work of fiction or non-fiction. This publishing prize was made possible by Sator Press, a nonprofit publishing company operated by Ken Baumann from 2009-2019. With the panoramic scope and astute sharpness of Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes and the eerie chill of Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, John Elizabeth Stintzi's My Volcano immediately grabs you by the shirt and doesn't let you go. Structured like a spiral moving through time and space, and deftly mixing history and myth and vision with poetic prose, this dread-inducing book will keep you up at night until you get to its last devastating, but ultimately, I think, hopeful line. --Alicia Elliott, bestselling author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground A kaleidoscopic, contemporary folktale with added acerbic juice, like when Dylan went electric. Stintzi somehow funnels the tumultuous present into a sprawling novel of collision and connection that's both timely and timeless. This is very weird shit indeed. --Hazel Jane Plante, author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) My Volcano is a fast-paced, gripping, singular novel that belongs to the new wave of eco-horror yielding to no conventions. --Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig Praise for John Elizabeth Stintzi's Vanishing Monuments * Shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award The Best Canadian Fiction of 2020, CBC Books The Best of the Rest 2020, Ms. Magazine A surreal, poetic meditation on the struggle to feel at home with the past, family, and one's own body. --Kirkus, on Vanishing Monuments A melancholic and complicated story about grief, memory and identity, the novel is a beautiful and compulsive read, packed with themes and ideas that will resonate with many LGBTQ2 people. --Nour Abi Nakhoul, Xtra on Vanishing Monuments Add John Elizabeth Stintzi to the honour roll of artists who have taken up this compelling and fraught task in the hope that the forms and structures of art could somehow tame the painful chaos of experience or make it more intelligible. --Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun on Vanishing Monuments Vanishing Monuments is mystifying and rhapsodic in equal terms, resisting easy summations. Through the power of John Elizabeth Stintzi's language, it leaves a bittersweet impression.. --Ho Lin, Foreword Reviews on Vanishing Monuments Praise for John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat * Finalist for the Raymond Souster Award from the League of Canadian Poets. John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat is a work of immense gentleness. The care shown toward the authorial self, the past, and those within Stintzi's emotional sphere is like coming up for air from a culture ruled by nihilism... To the poetics of the queer everyday Stintzi adds their Junebat, a multitudinous concept of such explanatory power I'm certain it'll endure in the collective memory of Canadian letters. Read this impressive debut! --Billy-Ray Belcourt, award-winning author of This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms, and A History of My Brief Body John Elizabeth Stintzi's Junebat is a piercing examination of body, self, and the miraculous yet painful process of becoming. In this emotionally intimate, technically brilliant debut collection, Stintzi both opens a window to their own soul and holds a mirror to the reader's. Quietly powerful, Junebat is the kind of book that one comes back to over and over, to read and to dream about. --Kai Cheng Thom, award-winning author of A Place

Author Information

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has been awarded the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and The Malahat Review's 2019 Long Poem Prize. Their writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Poetry, and many others. JES is the author of the novels My Volcano and Vanishing Monuments, as well as the poetry collection Junebat. They live with their wife in Kansas City, Missouri.

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