Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins


Janalyn Guo


revised 2024 reissue
ISBN 978-1-940853-35-2
134 pgs / $18




 


In Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins, an insomniac will do anything for sleep, crones released from a buried heart take over a town, a woman chooses to live her last days in a cave overlooking the sea, earthquake survivors establish a colony in a remote forest. With unwavering imagination and heart, Janalyn Guo delivers a cast of characters who find their own unusual ways to endure.

"These stories take the gestures of new wave fabulism and make it newer and even more wavy, by being genuinely international. Here's a book that shivers with possibility and wonder and surprise, where plants grow from people's bodies, where ghosts exist even before someone is dead. Guo isn't afraid to take on even the thoroughly weird in the most delightful way. This is what it's like to see a genre revivified."—Brian Evenson

"OUR COLONY BEYOND THE CITY OF RUINS is an absolute delight, a wild collection that unsettles as much as it entertains. Guo shows an impressive range and deep emotional intelligence--this is a rare book of both strangeness and heart."—Kelly Luce

"Reading Janalyn Guo’s stories is like looking at a Leonora Carrington painting; the neat, precise strokes of her language draw us into the surreal logic of her tender-hearted, fiercely imaginative, deliriously inventive tales. This collection, vivid and macabre, part dream and part reality, transports us to a magical world beyond our wildest dreams."—Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi


Reviews, excerpts, etc:

Hyperallergic

Necessary Fiction

Slug Mag

15 Bytes

Heavy Feather Review

Black Sun Lit

Heavy Feather Review




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