N. is a novella in the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, which investigates the ways we activate space through language. Expertly employing historical surrealism to critique orientalism, megalomaniac masculinity, and colonialism, Van der Vliet Oloomi rages against the abandonment of the natural world in favor of digital realms with satirical humor and restless energy.
Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father. He never shows up, instead sending her an allowance, care of an older Lebanese man. As the week progresses, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and catastrophic affair, shattering her on the cusp of adulthood. A compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, and the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain.
Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn’t fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago.
Books are Zebra’s only companions—until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she’s unhinged; she thinks he’s pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past.
A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.
"I have walked to the stone bridge that unites the two parts of the old quarter. My view of the city is lucid. Onyar River beneath the bridge. Three bridges go over the river: one stone, one wrought iron, and one wooden bridge. Beneath the wooden bridge, the river channel widens. It becomes deeper, then runs off into a wet, wooded valley that extends from the outer limits of the old quarter to the mountainous terrains of the north and the northeast. Farther east, among the Pyrenees, the Canigo mountain: its dense, black form composed of deep grooves and ridges, moss-encrusted rocks beyond which lies the frontier . . . "
New Herring Press publishes prose chapbooks of fiction, non-fiction and polemics. Chapbooks are published in sets of four. The 2011 series includes Girona (Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi), List (Deb Olin Unferth), May I Not Seem to Have Lived (Joseph Cardinale), and Doing Laps Without a Pool (Lynne Tillman).
