 First edition | |
| Author | Lance Olsen |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Postmodern novel, Historiographic metafiction |
| Publisher | Chiasmus Press |
Publication date | October 1, 2009 |
| Pages | 200 |
| ISBN | 098150275X |
Head in Flames is a postmodern novel by Lance Olsen, published by Chiasmus Press in 2009.
Head in Flames is a collage novel built on a triadic structure. First Vincent van Gogh speaks briefly (sometimes only a sentence, sometimes a handful) in the first person in a Times font. Next Theo van Gogh does the same in the third person in Times bold. Last Mohammed Bouyeri speaks in the second person in a Courier font. This pattern repeats for the length of the text. The effect is more musical than narrative in a conventional sense.
Van Gogh finds himself standing in a field in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, debating whether or not to commit suicide. Theo finds himself riding to work on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004 by Mohammed, an extremist outraged by the filmmaker's collaboration with controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a 10-minute experimental short critiquing Muslim subjugation and abuse of women.
The consequence of such a structure is a complex investigation into art's multiplicity of purpose, religion's increasingly dominant role as engine of politics and extremism in the contemporary world, the complexities involved in foreignness/assimilation, and the limits of cultural tolerance.
Rain Taxi wrote that Head in Flames is "distinguished both by its inventive, playful form and its evocative content," [1] while Review of Contemporary Fiction called Olsen's novel "an important book" whose "structure is a tour de force of formal innovation calling to mind Pinget's That Voice, Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch …. Olsen’s real success lies not in his critique of the many forms of intolerance but rather in his affirmation of art as salvation. [2]
Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Not commercially successful, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, eventually leading to his suicide at age thirty-seven.
Lust for Life is a 1956 American biographical film about the life of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, based on the 1934 novel of the same title by Irving Stone which was adapted for the screen by Norman Corwin.
Prey are organisms attacked and eaten by other organisms.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honor killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. She has founded an organisation for the defense of women's rights, the AHA Foundation. Ayaan Hirsi Ali works for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the American Enterprise Institute, and was a senior fellow at the Future of Democracy Project at Harvard Kennedy School.
Theodoor van Gogh was a Dutch film director. He directed Submission: Part 1, a short film written by Somali writer and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which criticised the treatment of women in Islam in strong terms. On 2 November 2004, he was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist who objected to the film's message. The last film Van Gogh had completed before his murder, 06/05, was a fictional exploration of the assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (1948–2002). It was released posthumously in December 2004, a month after Van Gogh's death, and two years after Fortuyn's death.
Mohammed Bouyeri is a Moroccan-Dutch convicted terrorist serving a life sentence without parole in the prison of Nieuw Vosseveld (Vught) for the assassination of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. A member of the Hofstad Network, he was incarcerated in 2004 and has since been serving a sentence of life with no possibility of parole.
Submission is a 2004 English-language Dutch short drama film produced and directed by Theo van Gogh, and written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali ; it was shown on the VPRO, a Dutch public broadcasting network, on 29 August 2004. The film's title is one of the possible translations of the Arabic word "Islam". A Muslim extremist reacted to the film by assassinating Van Gogh.
The Hofstad Network was an Islamist terror group composed mostly of Dutch citizens. The terror group was composed mainly of young men between the ages of 18 and 32. The name "Hofstad" was originally the codename the Dutch secret service AIVD used for the network and leaked to the media. The name likely refers to the nickname of the city of The Hague, where some of the suspected terrorists lived. The network was active throughout the 2000s.
Jason Walters or Jamal is a Dutch citizen who was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on charges related to Islamic terrorism.
Fiction Collective Two (FC2) is an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of avant-garde, experimental fiction supported in part by the University of Utah, the University of Alabama, Central Michigan University, Illinois State University, private contributors, arts organizations and foundations, and contest fees.
Lance Olsen is an American writer known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge.
The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman's Cry for Reason, also published as The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, is a 2004 book by the former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Caged Virgin was first published in English in 2006.
Hirsi Magan Isse, commonly known as Hirsi Magan, was a scholar and a leading figure of the Somali revolution. Part of Somalia's political elite, he was a leader in the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), one of the earliest and most influential factions in the Somali Civil War that broke out in 1991.
Infidel is a 2007 autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-Dutch activist and politician. Hirsi Ali has attracted controversy and death threats were made against Ali in the early 2000s over the publication of the book.
Johannes Juliaan Gijsbert "Hans" Jansen was a Dutch politician, scholar of contemporary Islam and author.
The term New Atheism was coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe the positions promoted by some atheists of the twenty-first century. New Atheism advocates the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated. Instead, they should be countered, criticized, and challenged by rational argument, especially when they exert undue influence, such as in government, education, and politics. Major figures include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett—collectively known as the "Four Horsemen", and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, known as the "plus one horse-woman".
Ebru Umar is a Dutch columnist of Turkish descent. Under the influence of Theo van Gogh, she gave up a career in management and became a columnist, first for van Gogh's website and, after he was assassinated, as his successor as a regular columnist of Metro. She writes for a number of Dutch magazines and has published four books, often on the topics of feminism and criticism of Islam.
Calendar of Regrets is a postmodern novel by American writer Lance Olsen, published by Fiction Collective Two in 2010.
10:01 is a postmodern novel by Lance Olsen, published in 2005 by Chiasmus Press. The book incorporates multiple micro-narratives written in various styles from the point of view of many different characters as they wait for a movie to begin playing in a theater.
Girl Imagined by Chance is a postmodern novel by Lance Olsen, published in 2002 by Fiction Collective Two. It is a work of metafiction designed to trouble the unexamined assumptions of the memoir.