Ascher/Straus - The Other Planet (30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition)

The Other Planet (30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition)

"…one of the indispensible novels of the twentieth century, a complex and unsentimental examination of the tensions crated by rapid social and technological change….This is fiction driven by ideas, ideas about the future, and the relentlessness of the everyday."

From Stephen Beachy's Foreword to the 30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition of The Other Planet.

Selected Works

Fiction

Headless World

Ascher/Straus' ultimate novel, completed just before Sheila Ascher's death in December, 2020. A uniquely daring speculative novel that takes an unprecedented leap forward into a cosmos ordered by principles closer to "loop quantum gravity" theory in its approach to space and time than to any more traditional theory while tracking the life of an abandoned child navigating multiple channels of possible identities, family plots and destinies.

Stephen Beachy, author of Glory Hole and boneyard, has already written: ". . . as if an alien species that had devoured our memories was now using them to shift the syntax of our thoughts." And: "A strange object, unlike any other book you'll ever read, relentless, hilarious, a ferocious trance, a secret key." And Rachel Nagelberg, author of The Fifth Wall, writes: ". . . the hope of transcendence arrives in the form of a novel that escapes the spoor of endless mechanical reproduction, in a narrative-channel that defies any viral popular culture logic — it's a 'twirling spindle of infinity' . . . I'm so in love with this book."

The Other Planet (30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition)

"…one of the indispensible novels of the twentieth century, a complex and unsentimental examination of the tensions created by rapid social and technological change….This is fiction driven by ideas, ideas about the future, and the relentlessness of the everyday." --From Stephen Beachy's Foreword to the 30th Anniversary (softcover) Edition of The Other Planet.

Hank Forest's Party

Companion volume to ABC Street, chronicling the events and characters of ABC Street as they amble by, circling around and through Hank Forest’s party, while finding ways to suggest the warp of time.

ABC Street

The boundary between novel and journal: the passing world chronicled as fiction.

"ABC Street sends out ripples that change our reading of the other Ascher/Straus books, blurring lines of memory and realism and imagination. . . ."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

The Menaced Assassin

". . . characters – Celeste, the Dane or the Swede, the taxi driver, one or several men named Antonio – are . . . obsessed with the future and with the unlimited sense of possibility that only gets horribly reduced anytime a decision is made, meaning created."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

"...the best kind of experimental fiction--innovative and entertaining."
--Caryn James, The Village Voice

Red Moon/Red Lake

". . . dialogue at once so real and so unreal that it seems like the way people might talk in dreams. The way people would talk if they were possessed by a rare intelligence. . . ."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

A mysterious "novel-in-stories": "Some of the most stylish ‘post-modern fiction’ there is."
--John Strausbaugh, New York Press

The Other Planet

". . . Valeria is haunted by the sense that there's a completely different way to live, akin to living on another planet. . . . She journeys. . . through Ascher/Straus-world, a world where film, TV, dreams, and brief conversations collide to create a hyperreal and moody landscape."
-- Stephen Beachy, San Francisco Bay Guardian

“. . . [an] absorbing, sexy and troubling reflection of these weird times. . . it should be read."
--John Strausbaugh, New York Press

QUICK LINKS

Authors Guild

Green Integer

McPherson & Company