PRAISE FOR VIVIENNE“Surreal, disorienting, and often stunning.”—F(r)iction “Russo’s art scene is delicious and dreadful, exaggerated so that it balances delicately only a note or two above the absurd.”—Southwest Review"Vivienne is a mordant, off-centre, and sweetly off-kilter tribute to Surrealism and forgotten artists at large that we’ve been waiting for . . . a quaintrelle cross between the main characters from Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica and Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year Of Rest and Relaxation."—Ester Freider, Compulsive Reader"An ending like a knife to the heart and a hot stone in one’s guts."—Underground Books"Stylish, satirical, and inventive, contemporary yet timeless, Vivienne takes place where urgent and unanswerable questions reside, at the intersections of art, love, and the immortal soul. It is surprising, mysterious, and delightful at every turn of the page, an utterly singular story circling the life and legacy of a fascinating and larger-than-life figure.” —Sarah Gerard, author of True Love“Russo is acidly funny . . . a talented enough writer to leave us with her characters, their interiority.”—Ross Barkan“Vivienne is innovatively told and unrelentingly engaging, and one of the year’s most impressive debuts.”—David Gutowski, LargeheartedBoy.com “Vivienne is a story of vision and creation; its author is an astrologer and mystic who deftly intertwines the art world with that of the occult.”—Evening House“A skin-crawling drama about three generations of women and their relationships to one another. . . a satirical comedy that is at its core a book of poetry, or literary art.”—Artnet"Vivienne is a dizzying, bold novel told in text messages, open letters by protesters, and vivacious surrealist prose."—Language Arts“Few these days manage to pull off such a playful yet measured balance between the sacred and the profane as well as Fitzgerald did . . . though Emmalea Russo’s latest novel Vivienne does come close.”—Stephen Adubato, Real Clear Books “If you like your fiction offbeat, unpredictable, and a little unhinged, Vivienne is calling your name.”—@booksontherunway“In an instant, one of our finest poets has become one of our finest novelists. Emmalea Russo is—as Leonard Cohen sang—‘All dressed to kill, in rags of light.’”—Bruce Wagner author of Dead Stars Russo's characters are vivid, alive, post-alive, carnivorous and weird: they contaminate and elevate. Vivienne is a powerful, ambiguous and magical novel that is both a work of art and a serious reflection on the risk of creation itself."—Nina Power, author of What Do Men Want? “Vivienne is a novel of rare vivacity and invention in a literary period not noted for visionary fictions: a vital recreation of the sheer scandal of our surreally real lives, a poet’s novel in the sense in which all novels worth the name should be poets’ novels: a work of poiesis, the inspired formation or manifestation of a new reality.”—John Pistelli, author of Major Arcana “A combustible alchemy of rare beauty and force. Russo’s lyrical prose crackles with vitality, and her story about an artist’s response to philistine attacks against her body of work is a triumph of literary courage and innovation."—Bernard Schweizer, author of Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism“An absolutely stunning, deeply compassionate and humorous satire, set against the backdrop of contemporary cultural politics. Russo expertly weaves a story that is both tragic and comic, grounded in deep psychological and philosophical insights. Russo's ability to blend the surreal with the everyday, to infuse humor into serious subject matter, and to navigate the nuances of art and morality in the digital age is nothing short of extraordinary." —Angie Speaks (aka Angie Baba-Ahmed), author of Late Stage Babylon (forthcoming) and cohost of Mystic and the Machine podcast "There are flashes in the work to suggest Emmalea Russo might have a bit of brilliance to her."—Jessa Crispin, The Metropolitan ReviewPRAISE FOR EMMALEA RUSSO“It has a messy epicurean sensibility which should appeal to art terrorists and ad hoc gangsters. A street credibility. It is my favorite volume of poetry written in the last however many years. . .”—Manuel Marrero on Confetti“Russo chronicles a desire for calm and unattachment in the face of the details of a life—a volatile relationship, the labor of gardening, a ‘Nervous disorder’ . . . Readers will likely find the primary pleasures of this book in this tension, as philosophy emerges from fracture and the poems gesture toward but never perform wholeness.”—Publishers Weekly on G“Moving seamlessly from the finely researched to the experiential, Wave Archive is precisely that, an accumulation of wave upon wave of Emmalea Russo’s thinking, being and responding through her researches upon and experiences around epilepsy.”—Rob McLennan on Wave Archive
