The Word Desire by Rikki Ducornet

From the Publisher

These twelve startlingly original stories about erotic desire are the best opportunity yet for adventurous renders to discover and explore the fiction of Rikki Ducornet, who over the past three decades has created a body of work that is as daring and finely wrought as any writer's. Each of these stories centers on a pivotal erotic moment in the lives of the men and women who narrate them. Desire is awakened by such seemingly inconsequential events as a glance, a dream, a thought, or a chance encounter. Yet in each instance a life is forever changed. Only a few are overtly sexual in content, but each explores the many strange reverberations that occur when desire is present, whether acted upon or kept inside.

Publishers Weekly

In a few pages, each of Ducornet's dozen stories creates a universe. Readers familiar with her work (NBCC finalist for The Jade Cabinet, etc.) will recognize the theme -- desire, its frustration, its perversion, its fulfillment. Not every story is perfect -- the polemical "The Student from Algiers" and the too-personal title story diverge from the book's universal and affective tenor. But in the other tales, all set in slightly menacing locales (France, Egypt, Babylon or New York's Hudson River Valley), characters are destroyed by the imposition of others' longings or the abnegation of their own. In "Vertige Dor," the scholar of the title wanders India in an erratic, erotic search for an ancient race of four-armed beings. The priest of "The Foxed Mirror" experiences one pagan hour of temptation and illumination with a young artist, but his pious cowardice keeps him from any such human connection again. In "Roseveine," the narrator, terrorized as a young boy by his father's brutal description of the Madagascar market where live tortoises are displayed stripped of their shells, devises elaborate carapaces for his beloved from his sanctuary in the asylum. But perhaps the lap-dog in "Fortun" puts it best. Josephine Beauharnais's little pet pines for Egypt and a somnolent dachshund. His desires may be painful, even fatal, but with them he is "no longer a mere biological being but one capable of reverie."(Oct.)

Library Journal

The author of Phospor in Dreamland (LJ 10/15/95) here displays her linguistic mastery to fine effect. The 12 stories, set in an array of locales and historical periods, depict variations of erotic longing. Ducornet's characters -- not all of them human -- endure moments of exquisite or tortuous passion. In the haunting "The Neurosis of Containment," a repressed Thirties spinster suddenly finds (or imagines) herself cavorting with dark angels in a Hudson River manor garden. The young Mexican priest in "The Foxed Mirror" loses heart and soul to a wild artist spinning children's tops on his own flesh. In "Wormwood," a little girl at her grandfather's deathbed is startled by the secret sensuality of a grotesque carving. The title story explores graphically the self-annihilations of physical love. Distinguished by evocative language and poetic imagery, these sophisticated, clever tales belong in most collections of literary fiction. Starr Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.

What People Are Saying

Katherine Mosby
Dark, elegant, and exotic. Ducornet's stories are meticulously crafted, striking unexpected notes that are breathtaking as they are troubling.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Rikki Ducornet takes the reader on a provocative journey of intriguing characters and locales; her stories are sensual, beautifully written, and startling.

Michael Silverblatt
Delicate and brutal, like nonsense verse about matters enormously serious, in these erotic minitures Rikki Ducornet continues to create a literature where Allice in Wonderland meets the Marquis de Sade, East meets West, and irreconcilable opposition blur to form a work that is, like Rikki Ducornet herself, singular and beautiful.

Charlotte Innes
With this breathtaking collection of stories, Rikki Ducornet has proved once again that few can match her for wit, literary beauty, and humane insight... This book should be the occasion for wild celebrations over the awesome capacity of one mind to take us on journeys of the imagination we might never dare alone.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents