NICETIES is a subversive text of lingual dissonance in which vocality precedes sense-making operations. Its phonics disrupt narrative through syntactical atonalities.
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“If you’re weary of mild, obedient prose, try plunging into the pages of Elizabeth Mikesch’s exuberant debut. This book is witchcraft: stories refreshingly loosely translated from the real by a mind that moves on its own.”
—Noy Holland
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“It will hardly do the trick to say that NICETIES is a breath of fresh
air. In Elizabeth Mikesch’s compressedly melodious prose, a reader
inhales purifying drafts of something entirely unexpected in these literary
dog days—not some novelty intoxicant concocted as a careerist stunt but
some rarer ether releasing itself at long last into the world to dazzle, yes,
but also to clarify so much of what we had never dreamed clarifiable
about the ecstasy of our human mess.”
—Gary Lutz
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“What the fiction that is Elizabeth Mikesch’s knows is more than what
most other fiction knows. Mikesch makes in ways that makes speech both
impossible to say and impossible not to say. Oh but to say it sayingly. Her
way of saying is one in which speech comes before meaning and meaning
is best left to the music—makers among us. The music, in Mikesch’s hands,
is a musicality that makes the entire body into an ear. Listen, listen, and
be changed.”
—Peter Markus
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