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See Part of the Book Here!Where realities crossbreed.
Robert Stikmanz’s Prelude to a Change of Mind: The First Book in The Lands of Nod is a quiet, intimate, and delightfully quirky novel from the dreamtime that does not fit handily into familiar categories. It is simultaneously a sweet and terrifying coming of the ages story that examines the use and misuse of the human imagination. With grace and wry humor, this tale comes to life in the mountain fastness of a possible recent past or parallel history to evoke a world in which elves and dwarves burst from legend into life. The “change of mind” of the title belongs to Meg Christmas, firewatcher in the forest ranges of a western sierra. When crisis threatens the strange, small folk who befriend her, she must plumb within herself for abilities to confront, accept, and save a reality previously unsuspected. This brilliant work from poet and artist Robert Stikmanz blends fantasy, speculative science fiction, and social critique into a unique call for an imaginative leap of faith in the belief in pleasure and compassion, into a realization that the ages-old longing for a paradise of flesh and soul is not a fairy tale but a destiny.
Rob Lewis (aka Robert Stikmanz) has had a presence in the Austin creative underground for three decades. His poems and other writings appeared in all the Sleepy Tree anthologies, and in Aileron, The Argonaut, The Cannon, and Vowel Movement, among others. He has published three chapbooks. Lewis’s visual work has ranged from cover illustrations for the late Albert Huffstickler to political posters to digital drawings to ambient video projections. Lewis lives in Austin, Texas. Prelude to a Change of Mind is his first novel.
Press Release:
Dalton Publishing announces the release of Robert Stikmanz’s Prelude to a Change of Mind: The First Book in The Lands of Nod. (Trade paperback, 168 pages, 13.95)
Where realities crossbreed.
When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, there is little a woman will not do. It’s just that sex with an elf isn’t usually at the top of the list.
At the dawn of the nuclear age a young woman faces a terrifying new world, one in which her sanity seems to be the first casualty. Feverish and alone in an isolated outpost in the American west, Meg Christmas encounters strange healing creatures led seemingly by a pot-smoking, poetry-spouting dwarf with a keen eye for budding sexuality and a disconcerting way of appearing and disappearing out of thin air. More disturbing, an old woman tells Meg the price she must pay for her unorthodox healing is not her soul, but the bearing of a child who may be destined to save not merely the world, but the universe itself…Download Full Press Release PDF
Sample Review:
To create a parallel world that is both fantastic and painfully real is not terribly difficult given today’s technology and political and social realities. We are faced with massive species extinctions, horrific sectarian violence, climate change that could create massive social upheaval in our lifetime and technologies that simultaneously offer us cures of crippling diseases and life spans that could match Methuselah.
We are literally on the verge of breakthroughs in knowledge that could allow us to travel through time, to cross parallel worlds, to leave the universe, as we know it. We could also be at a dead end in less than a century…Download Full Sample Review PDF
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