Beige Pursuit

Author: Sara Magenheimer

Publisher: Wendy's Subway (2021)

A character called X journeys through a present that is neither here nor there, but feels oddly proximate. She moves through landscapes of words, ever-shifting to host the groundless present, a place and time driven by her motivated, yet contextless pursuit. Narrative is always under construction. The preferred medium for X’s peregrinations: a sentence, as capacious as a three-second video, a ten-year nap, or an unexplored hard drive. In this suspended world, X’s sensorium is curious and alert, but also anguished, hesitant, and precarious: she feels around for sympathetic energies and familiar faces along the way. Along what way? A book like a body might be a room for waiting, a machine for memory, a sensuous thing, an image quickly glimpsed, a performance still ongoing...

Edition of 500

"In sequences absurd, antic, and familiar (with an asterisk), Sara captures the punchy, fractured interior landscape of a world manicured by encoded determinism."

-Nicole Kaack

"Is X pure data? There is mention of her bossy body, but is that body the whole wide world? The cosmos? The singularity? X is a mother, newly, but more pressingly, X is a blinking cursor; the promise of a word. X might be predictive text, but she herself is unpredictable. Is X atmosphere or algorithm? What’s the big diff? Are you my (biological) father, the peonies might ask the mushroom cap, whose answer could be, 'Oh.' Rosemarie Waldrop has lunch in the ether with Lewis Carroll then meets Renee Gladman on a shopping mall escalator to dish. I trust this lysergic logic, shimmering through our present din."

-Corrine Fitzpatrick