Bird - Tapa dura

Praise for Bird: "A wonderfully mysterious and inventive novel about the search for the sublime at home and in the wider world." --Jenny Offill, author of Last Things and Department of Speculation "This is Noy Holland at her dazzling and disturbing best. She animates what we struggle to keep unknown, the suppressed, the barely to be borne, in a prismatic, restless language that illuminates a heaven and hell of visions and want."--Joy Williams, author of State of Grace and The Visiting Privilege "Headstrong and heartsick; a nerve scraped raw on every page. This is the kind of brilliant work that can be devoured in a day but should be savored far longer."--Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot "The present is mercilessly upended and contaminated in this ardent and harrowing telling of Bird's erotically charged, drug- addled fascination with something jungly -- the Abyss in the shape of Mickey, a youth galvanized by his own implosion. Noy Holland writes with an incandescent ink." --Rikki Ducornet "Every sentence in Noy Holland's Bird is, as always, an amazement, a complete drama about rhythm and texture and rendition that's in reality a complete drama about the brutal perplexities called our rented world." --Lance Olsen, author of Theories of Forgetting Praise for The Spectacle of the Body: "Ms. Holland habitually challenges the usual limits of language, but the effects of her exuberance are never precious and often turn suddenly into beauty; her characters portray themselves in a discourse that is startling but genuine, the secret syntax of real lives." --William Ferguson, New York Times Book Review "If you could breed a writer out of Faulkner by John Hawkes, and put it in a female frame, you might have Noy Holland." --Padgett Powell "Holland writes with masterful clarity and startling power about people who stay in our lives. Her fiction is profound, moving, and important." --Frederick Busch Praise for What Begins with Bird: "A ravishing associative logic of recurrent objects and sounds distinguishes Noy Holland's original stories. Old wisdom newly and grandly delivered." --Christine Schutt, author of Florida "In wonderfully cadenced and concise prose, Swim for the Little One First cracks the chests of struggling lives to show the hearts beating within. These stories of difficulty are not sentimental, nor are they artificially cold: they are wonderfully, nakedly human." --Brian Evenson, author of The Wavering Knife "The syncopated rhythms of Noy Holland's rapturous prose jolt the heart and spark the senses. If you can bear to explore the limits of your own compassion, open this book to 'Blood Country' or 'Milk River.' You cannot prepare yourself: you can only surrender." --Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River and In This Light "Holland's scrupulousness and respect for the language keep this text alive and kicking. What Begins with Bird is a book to be read slowly and thoughtfully, shared, passed along." --John Edgar Wideman "From broken phrase to sentence, from sentence to paragraph, from paragraph to scene and scene to story, Noy Holland's aims are ambitious, her tone right, her diction masterful, and she spells her stories out in bites of beautifully lyrical but bitter prose and with an ardent grimness of eye that is both unsettling and intensely satisfying. What Begins with Bird is a remarkable achievement." --William Gass

This is a novel about the persistence of longing in which the twin lives of the title character blur and overlap. Bird puts her child on the bus for school and passes the day with her baby. Interwoven into the passage of the day are phone calls from a promiscuous, unmarried friend, and Bird's recollection of the feral, reckless love she knew as a young woman. It's a day infused with fear and longing, an exploration of the ways the past shapes and dislodges the present. In the present moment, Bird dutifully cares for her husband, infant, older child. But at the same time Bird inhabits this rehabilitated domestic life, she re-lives an unshakeable passion: Mickey, the lover she returns to with what feels like a migratory impulse, Mickey, whose movements and current lovers she still tracks. With Mickey, she slummed and wandered--part-time junkie, tourist of the low-life--a life of tantalizing peril. This can't last, Bird thought, and it was true. Noy Holland's writing is lyrical, fired by a heightened eroticism in which every sight and auditory sensation is charged with arousal. The writing in this book -- Noy Holland's first novel -- is fearless in its depiction of sexual appetite and obsessive love. It sheds light on the terror of abandonment and the terrible knowledge that we are helpless to protect not only ourselves but the people we most love.