The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte
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SPORK PRESS | AMAZON
The hybrid book is a novel in flash fictions that looks at the paintings and life of the Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte from the perspectives of his wife Georgette and their shared series of beloved Pomeranian dogs, all called Loulou. They draw heavily on my recent work as the co-editor of Magritte’s Selected Writings, a lost manuscript that–with Eric Plattner–I rediscovered, edited, and brought out for the first time ever in an English edition in Fall 2016 in both the UK and the United States.
“The house is haunted but nobody’s home. Only us chickens, standing still as sculpture while Loulou, the immortal Pomeranian, & Georgette, Magritte’s guardian angel, take us on a tour of the asylum. The rooms in Kathleen Rooney’s The Listening Room are always listening, always watching. The walls have ears. The tears have eyes. Sometimes the screams are silent. Sometimes the silence is deafening. Stark & hard-edged as the paintings themselves, this novel in poems and flashes inhabits a world much like our own — suspended in a glazed animation of doomed hope & hopeful doom, where the virtual is realer than reality, where the muse & the bemused are confused, where the funny is wedded to the sad in unholy matrimony. “Mystery,” Magritte wrote late in life, “is not one of the possibilities of reality. Mystery is what is absolutely necessary for reality to exist.” Take a load off. Escape is not an option. There are no windows & no doors, only holes through which the sky or an oncoming train pours in. The stairs dead end. The clouds are voodoo dolls, sweet enough to eat. But who, Georgette & Loulou forever wonder, will devour whom?” ~Eric Plattner, co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings
O, Democracy!
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AMAZON | INDIE BOUND | BARNES & NOBLE
It’s late spring of 2008, and one of Illinois’ two Democratic senators is poised to become the next president of the United States. Colleen Dugan works for the other one—not on Capitol Hill, but in a Chicago skyscraper that overlooks Lake Michigan, among coworkers with little to do but field calls from angry constituents while the future of the nation gets decided elsewhere. In the coming weeks Colleen will navigate the perils of costumed protestors, thuggish union reps, vacuous interns, trifling bureaucrats, dirty tricks by the Senator’s Republican rival, and the unexpected discovery of a scandalous secret that will give her the power to change the course of the election and shape her own fate—though not necessarily for the better.
A quarterlife crisis viewed from the ghostly perspective of the Founding Fathers, O, Democracy! is a hilarious and heartbreaking story about American politics and the difficult business of being a good citizen: walking the tricky line between self-sacrifice and self-sabotage, between doing your part and knowing your place.
“O, Democracy! is a rare literary creation: an often very funny novel that looks with an unblinking eye at the inherent contradictions in today’s political and cultural landscapes. Kathleen Rooney’s debut novel is ambitious, smart, and hard to put down.”
—Christine Sneed, author, Little Known Facts
“With O, Democracy!, Kathleen Rooney makes a swift and seamless transition from poetry to fiction, pairing her skill for image with a fresh voice, humor, and a keen eye for the political world she navigates here. An exciting debut.”
—Elizabeth Crane, author, We Only Know So Much
“O, Democracy! infuriates and inspires. Rooney has written a brilliant and fiercely readable novel of politics and ideals, both an indictment and a celebration of the American Experiment, which will leave you breathless.”
—Jonathan Evison, author, West of Here