[09/22/25] Puig, Kelly: The Book of Embers

Essay Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 22, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, The Book of Embers re-envisions what a book can be—labyrinth, fugue, hologram of inquiry—to rewrite literary possibility from the inside out. Loosely guided by the musings of a modern-day Ariadne, this genre-defiant work traces the spiral path of language, lineage, and what it means to live at the edge of story, self, and structure. Part literary séance, part fractal dimension, it braids essay, fiction, art history, memoir, and literary criticism into a thread that tunnels through the architecture of thought into the centerless, recursive nature of consciousness itself. Here, the book becomes body, the body becomes book, and the reader—both catalyst and clue. Here, Hilma af Klint converses with Borges, Lispector, Pessoa, and Cixous, one egg hatches another, and time collapses in a footnote. Here, the book reveals a flame burning inside itself as alchemical retort: a device that is also a process, a process that is also a person, transmuting endlessly. At once an unfurling of the cosmos and map of interior contours, The Book of Embers is ultimately an ode to the imagination's ever-unfolding terrain.