Description:

“I’m on my way back. I was one of the first they took away.” So begins Robert Kelly’s remarkable science fiction novel about a literally divided self. “I” is Billy, the book’s protagonist, a boy who is captured by a group of aliens who take him to a cave and meticulously, if seemingly by caprice, remove his “young pure smokeless lungs” and other internal organs to replace them with two gray squirrels, a live hawk, a shoe, and a variety of other bizarre objects. Billy’s body and mind are spun off into a curious twin, one whose adventures Billy is forced by his captors to watch and try to make sense of—not a simple task when he sees his doppelgänger stealing everything from him: body, name, family, his beloved Eileen. Complicating matters, and forcing Billy deeper into his ironic journey of self, is a mysterious pamphlet called “The Book from the Sky,” written by what may be yet another variation of Billy himself, Brother William. This stunningly imaginative work, echoing the late novels of Iris Murdoch and the fantasies of Robert Charles Wilson and Jonathan Stroud while remaining inimitably Kelly’s own, offers adventurous readers a “cabinet of wonders” not unlike the body of his beleaguered young hero.

Author Biography:

A prominent figure in American letters since the late 1950s, Robert Kelly has published over 50 books, including 10 novels, and has won the American Book Award and other prizes for his work. His writing has appeared in Conjunctions and other literary magazines. A teacher at Bard College, he lives in Red Hook, NY.

Reviews/Endorsements:

"All aboard this vintage flying saucer for an entertaining reimagining of the ancient theme of the double. Like much of Robert Kelly’s writing, both whimsical and erudite, earthy and ethereal, a boy’s space adventure comic book interleafed with a provocatively eccentric book of wisdom."
—Robert Coover, author of The Public Burning

“Kelly is a poet with a religio-mystic bent, for whom the cultic vistas of the universe are routine stops... The story is toned with a vatic sense of mission, and Kelly’s poetic incongruities exert an eerie force: ‘Darling, if you want to find heaven keep looking down. The mud has much to tell you.’”
—Marx Dorrity, Chronogram Magazine

"Like certain other speculative romances (perhaps Stranger in a Strange Land, or 'The Gospel of Judas'), Kelly’s superbly eerie SciFi novel might give rise to a whole new religion—but one in which words are as real as stones."
—Peter Lamborn Wilson, author of Pirate Utopias

"Alien abduction has always been the most intimate and insidious of 'supernatural' rumors, and when, as here, a poet brings his own magic to bear on it, we begin to understand what it means: it is the dream of a reality reseeded by heaven. The reader longs to live in Kelly's book, as in a paradise restored."
—Carey Harrison, author of Freud: A Novel

“Prolific poet and novelist Robert Kelly concocts a complex and compelling story that explores the metaphysical origins of language, spirituality, and identity. The Book From the Sky is at once a confessional and a spiritual guidebook, a book that intersperses odd aphoristic affirmations with an internal journey of divorced selves who, much like the entangled quantum particles with their “spooky action at a distance,” have inextricably intertwined fates. This entrancing novel lures the reader with a science fiction story and then unravels amazing ideas that spiral outward. As this book settles in the reader’s mind, one must be content to let the ideas take on a life of their own.”
—Rain Taxi Magazine

“I appreciated the stream of consciousness at the beginning of the book and during some of Billy's sojourn on that other planet. The book within the book, which is a sort of book of proverbs, had interesting commentary.”
—MostlyFiction Book Reviews

The Book from the Sky

Written by Robert Kelly

Price: $15.95

Description:

Author Biography:

Reviews/Endorsements: