Absence

ABOUT “Quincy’s hypnotic prose is lyrically pleasing as well as philosophically rich.”—Hannah Bonner, BOMB"A thoughtful, imaginative work of fiction. Absence might be described as a chimeric blend of Sebald’s Austerlitz and Bolaño’s 2666. The book combines the retrospective gaze of the former with the disparate superstructure of the latter. Quincy’s debut is an inspired one: there is no denying the sheer inventiveness and detail of his architecture."—D.W. White, Necessary Fiction Haunting and atmospheric, Issa Quincy’s Absence is an indelible nesting doll of human impression and memory.As a child, an unnamed narrator’s mother reads to him a poem. Throughout his life, the poem reappears mysteriously, in the affecting life experiences of others as they are recounted to him. An eccentric and beloved schoolteacher leaves behind a dark secret after his death. An elderly woman returns to the same hotel on the Tunisian coast every year as an act of remembrance for a disappeared brother. T