Eleven Sooty Dreams

February 9, 2021novel | pb | 140 pgs5.5" x 8.5" 978-1-948830-26-3 “Stylistically inventive, heartfelt, and vivid, this shows a beguiling, talented author running on all cylinders.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review In Manuela Draeger’s poetic “post-exotic” novel, a group of young leftists trapped in a burning building after one year’s Bolcho Pride parade plunge back into their childhood memories, trading them with each other as their lives are engulfed in flames. They remember Granny Holgolde’s stories of the elephant Marta Ashkarot, who travels through the Bardo to find her home and be reincarnated again and again. They remember the Soviet folk singer Lyudmila Zykina and her melancholic, simple songs of unspeakable beauty. They remember the half-human birds Granny Holgolde called strange cormorants, the ones who knew how to live in fire, secrecy, and death, and as the flames grow they hope to become them. Draeger, a heteronym for the acclaimed French writer Antoine Volodine, and a lib