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Lily Hoang

Lily Hoang is the author of five books: Parabola (Chiasmus Press, 2008), Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008), The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press, 2009), Unfinished (Jaded Ibis Press, 2010), and Old Cat Lady (1913 Press, forthcoming 2014-15). With Blake Butler, she edited 30...

The Evolutionary Revolution

Lily Hoang

Introduction by Anna Joy Springer
Cover art by VD Collective
Book 4 of 5, TrenchArt Maneuvers Series
Fiction | $15.00
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-14-1
Size: 9.25″ X 4.25″
Pages: 246
Binding: Softcover, Perfect

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What if evolution was decided by committee and revolution by mere chance? What if man was a subspecies? What if man, as a subspecies, was woman, with tiny red wings on her thighs and pasted shut eyes? What if she flew in the sky or slept on the moon, and what if the earth was a saltless water world filled with forgetful, vengeful two-headed mermen? Welcome to The Evolutionary Revolution, a fabulist story of sense-making for the 21st century. In this twinning tale of freak shows and prophets, tract homes and impending doom, award-winning author Lily Hoang collapses time and narrative into a brilliant novel of beginnings and ends, where sentences undo each other and opposites don’t cancel each other out. As Anna Joy Springer notes in the book’s introduction, “In literature, as sometimes in life, it’s a scary kind of fun to be manipulated by a pretty girl, who changes the game on a whim.”

Praise for The Evolutionary Revolution

“a ‘feminine feral’ book”

— Bhanu Kapil

“Lily is utilizing the underlying structures of myths and fables, but turns the functions of such stories on their heads in the process.”

-Read more in Jackie Wang’s Epistolary Review for BOMB

“The Evolutionary Revolution is a thoughtful and endearing work that will leave you dreaming in Hoang’s imaginative past for days.”

NewPages

“There are so many possibilities in The Evolutionary Revolution — choices that provide the reader with adventurous scenarios, concocting piece by piece a sense of renewal and strength upon finishing the text. Hoang brands complex, coiled fable into memory with ease.”

— Bookslut

“[T]he most enjoyable element in The Evolutionary Revolution is the constant, open-ended criticisms of memory and nostalgia, the way we (as a person, as a society, as a culture, as a nation, etc.) look backward and interpret not only the past as it stands objectively, but how we even deal with the act of remembering itself, how we question or do not question ‘facts’ and other types of cultural givens that affect how we interact and behave.”

White Walls / Black Ink

“Before starting this book I thought, ‘No, Lily could not possibly do it again.’ She has written two terrific books in the last couple years, Parabola (Chiasmus) and Changing (Fairy Tale Press). Finally, Les Figues has just come out with The Evolutionary Revolution, a wild fabulist book where a number of remarkable things happen, among them females living in the sky and eating on the fertile moon at night. So far in my reading, it would seem she did it again.”

-Three part series on The Evolutionary RevolutionExperimental Fiction/Poetry

“[…] this book will never let you settle into comfortable understanding…of its story, characters, even language itself. Overlapping genres constantly, Hoang wittily glides from fable to myth, from novel to intermittent stabs at something like personal essays […]”

The Pedestal Magazine

“This is a book about evolution, about a failed evolutionary revolution, and in a layering deftly handled by one of the new queens of fairy tale play, the text itself also evolves and the language is used for revolt.”

The Collagist

Featured as one of “three books I read recently and loved” by Dennis Cooper