The Word Desire

by Rikki Ducornet

Overview

A madman recalls his first erotic encounter, a priest loses sleep over a heretic, a scholar searches for the anomaly that inspired the Hindu divinities, a spinster hallucinates her own seductions, a pope suckles a wet nurse. Erotic and fiercely funny, these stories range across many centuries and cultures, from Algeria to Egypt to Italy to France, and all demonstrate time and again why Rikki Ducornet has been called "one of the most interesting American writers around" (Nation).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564789914
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	04/01/2005
Series:	Lannan Selection
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	202
File size:	248 KB

About the Author

Rikki Ducornet was born in New York and has lived in North Africa, South America, Canada and France. Her work as an illustrator first came to the attention of the Canadian book trade in 1974 with the publication of Susan Musgrave's "Gullband". In 1983, the Porcupine's Quill commissioned Rikki to illustrate an edition of Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".

Rikki is the author of three short-story collections, seven books of poetry, and seven novels, including "The Fan-Maker's Inquisition" and "The Jade Cabinet". She is also a painter whose work has been exhibited widely. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

What People are Saying About This

Katherine Mosby

Dark, elegant, and exotic. Ducornet's stories are meticulously crafted, striking unexpected notes that are breathtaking as they are troubling.

Charlotte Innes

With this breathtaking collection of stories, Rikki Ducornet has proved once again that few can match her for wit, literary beauty, and humane insight... This book should be the occasion for wild celebrations over the awesome capacity of one mind to take us on journeys of the imagination we might never dare alone.

Michael Silverblatt

Delicate and brutal, like nonsense verse about matters enormously serious, in these erotic minitures Rikki Ducornet continues to create a literature where Allice in Wonderland meets the Marquis de Sade, East meets West, and irreconcilable opposition blur to form a work that is, like Rikki Ducornet herself, singular and beautiful.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Rikki Ducornet takes the reader on a provocative journey of intriguing characters and locales; her stories are sensual, beautifully written, and startling.

Editorial Reviews

In a few pages, each of Ducornet's dozen stories creates a universe. Readers familiar with her work (NBCC finalist for The Jade Cabinet, etc.) will recognize the theme -- desire, its frustration, its perversion, its fulfillment. Not every story is perfect -- the polemical "The Student from Algiers" and the too-personal title story diverge from the book's universal and affective tenor. But in the other tales, all set in slightly menacing locales (France, Egypt, Babylon or New York's Hudson River Valley), characters are destroyed by the imposition of others' longings or the abnegation of their own. In "Vertige Dor," the scholar of the title wanders India in an erratic, erotic search for an ancient race of four-armed beings. The priest of "The Foxed Mirror" experiences one pagan hour of temptation and illumination with a young artist, but his pious cowardice keeps him from any such human connection again. In "Roseveine," the narrator, terrorized as a young boy by his father's brutal description of the Madagascar market where live tortoises are displayed stripped of their shells, devises elaborate carapaces for his beloved from his sanctuary in the asylum. But perhaps the lap-dog in "Fortun" puts it best. Josephine Beauharnais's little pet pines for Egypt and a somnolent dachshund. His desires may be painful, even fatal, but with them he is "no longer a mere biological being but one capable of reverie."(Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The author of Phospor in Dreamland (LJ 10/15/95) here displays her linguistic mastery to fine effect. The 12 stories, set in an array of locales and historical periods, depict variations of erotic longing. Ducornet's characters -- not all of them human -- endure moments of exquisite or tortuous passion. In the haunting "The Neurosis of Containment," a repressed Thirties spinster suddenly finds (or imagines) herself cavorting with dark angels in a Hudson River manor garden. The young Mexican priest in "The Foxed Mirror" loses heart and soul to a wild artist spinning children's tops on his own flesh. In "Wormwood," a little girl at her grandfather's deathbed is startled by the secret sensuality of a grotesque carving. The title story explores graphically the self-annihilations of physical love. Distinguished by evocative language and poetic imagery, these sophisticated, clever tales belong in most collections of literary fiction. Starr Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.

Library Journal