Disintegration in Four Parts

Four writers, four different perspectives on the problematic notion of purity."e;All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal."e; With this sentence as a starting point, four authors each write a novella considering the concept of purity, all from astonishingly different angles. Jean Marc Ah-Sen writes about love blooming between two writers belonging to feuding literary movements. Emily Anglin explores an architect's search for her twin at a rural historic house. Devon Code documents the Wittgensteinian upheavals of the last days of an elderly woman. And Lee Henderson imagines Dada artist Kurt Schwitters finding unlikely inspiration in a Second World War internment camp in northern Norway.Wildly different in style and subject matter, these four virtuoso pieces give us a 360-degree view of a philosophical theme that has never felt so urgent. Despite the disparity of their subject matter a Nazi-evading Dadaist detained in Norway, urban and familial estrangements, complicated love amid the avant-garde, the vicissitudes of old age these brilliantly inventive, delightfully strange stories cling together like four unlikely soulmates, unified by art s pursuit of coherence through life s various disintegrations. —Pasha Malla, author of Kill the Mall