Annihilation Songs

With Annihilation Songs: Three Shakespeare Reintegrations writer and award-winning filmmaker Jason DeBoer presents radical anagrammatic takes on The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Hamlet. Using only the words contained within each original drama, DeBoer's experimental fictions were created by disintegrating and then reintegrating Shakespeare's language into new narratives of warfare and desire. The result is an ultra-vivid hypertext, a warped yet faithful concordance of astounding poetic power, with theoretical roots in the earth of Bataille, Nietzsche, and Sade. These gripping tales are preceded by an introduction by Tosh Berman and Killing the Dogs of Kathmandu, DeBoer's psychedelic account of the origin of his technique in Nepal, and the history of the reintegrations.



"An unprecedented supernova of narrative, DeBoer's work transforms Shakespeare's well-worn lexicon, taking it through a skillfully woven and compelling wormhole. Inverting a vocabulary deeply seared into the collective unconscious, DeBoer's innovative text transports the reader to a glistening event horizon of satisfying new puzzles, mysteries, and timeless preoccupations. A resounding triumph of structure and language, form, and voice." --Quintan Ana Wikswo, author of The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far



"Annihilation Songs is a virtuoso performance of constrained writing. In these meticulous anagrams, DeBoer's experiment is both revelatory and reverent. Renaissance wars are reset as modern wars, as we discover that the strategic maps and weapons of the Normandy beach landings were already present in the Shakespearean occult. Seductions traverse, delirium transmutes. This book is not a Burroughsian cut-up, nor a slash and burn revealing useful accidents, it is--in its enactment--a profound reading of history and cultural imagination." --James Reich, author of Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness