Hex

A Novel

Fiction & Literature
Cover of the book Hex by Sarah Blackman, University of Alabama Press
View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart
Author: Sarah Blackman ISBN: 9781573668675
Publisher: University of Alabama Press Publication: April 1, 2016
Imprint: Fiction Collective 2 Language: English
Author: Sarah Blackman
ISBN: 9781573668675
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Publication: April 1, 2016
Imprint: Fiction Collective 2
Language: English

**The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other TalesHex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.

Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
 
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
 
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

**The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other TalesHex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.

Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
 
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
 
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.

More books from University of Alabama Press

Cover of the book Caring, Curing, Coping by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Warriors Without War by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Service as Mandate by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Theatre Symposium, Vol. 23 by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Going for Gold by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Looking South by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Collards by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book The Archaeology of Town Creek by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book The Two Worlds of William March by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Archaeopoetics by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book The Victory Album by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Brutes or Angels by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Mythography by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book The Voyage of the CSS Shenandoah by Sarah Blackman
Cover of the book Hospice by Sarah Blackman
We use our own "cookies" and third party cookies to improve services and to see statistical information. By using this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy