There is no one else at work on the American scene like her.
—Laird Hunt, National Book Award finalist and author of Zorrie

Love Chronicles of the Octopodes by Karen An-hwei Lee

ISBN 978-1-940400-10-5 | Fiction |  $20.00 | pub date: 3/23/23
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Q: How to pronounce the title?
A: LUHV kron-i-kuhlz uv thee ahk-TAW-puh-deez | listen

In a dystopic future of unregulated gene editing, a woman named Emily wakes up on the wrong side of the universe as an octopus thanks to rogue “designer genes” run amok. One of thousands of clones generated from a genetic code sequenced from a lock of hair saved from the original Emily Dickinson, the ersatz Emily resembles an octopus but harbors the soul of a human poet and navigates her life in a lagoon as a bumbling “rogue soul” enamored of black spice cake, botanical monographs, and gingerbread recipes, while romanced by personified moonlight.

Praise for Love Chronicles of the Octopodes

Poet, translator, and novelist Lee (The Maze of Transparencies) shows off all her talents in this singular sci-fi novel… Lee’s confident, graceful, and richly poetic writing expands the strange, dreamlike narrative in all directions at once, like slow outward ripples of water. The result is a lyrical meditation on art, science, and consciousness that readers won’t soon forget.
—Publishers Weekly

[A] book to be savoured for its extravagant glee in the use of language… As you close the novel you may be no closer to understanding our octopus narrator than Emily is herself, yet the richness of imagery will stay with you.
—Paul Kincaid in Strange Horizons

Original, compelling, thought-provoking, entertaining, Love Chronicles of the Octopodes will have a special appeal to readers with an interest in genetic engineering and its possible consequences.
—Midwest Book Review

The language is plated and dexterous, an exosuit for contemplations that has no trouble craning into the weird shapes they demand. Philosophical, xenosagacious, exquisitely attuned to the soul-kicking improbabilities that animate it, Love Chronicles is a fugitive experiment in confessing the unreal truth of our all-defining displacements.
—Ian Dreiblatt, Spamzine

Karen An-Hwei Lee, whose marvelous mind gave us Kafka — weird as ever and wonderfully alive — in twenty-first century Los Angeles and then a post-apocalyptic data cloud on a quest for the keys to happiness, outdoes herself with this brilliant head bend of a book. Love Chronicles of the Octopodes chronicles the adventures of one Emily D, octopus extraordinaire whose signal genetic material can be traced back to a certain legendary poet from Amherst but whose verve and swerve are all her own. Which is to say that Emily D is an original. As is Lee. There is no one else at work on the American scene like her.
—Laird Hunt, National Book Award finalist and author of Zorrie

Have you ever watched the hues of a sleeping octopus shift dreamily from bright chartreuse to ghostly pale blue and from ghostly pale blue to the color of evening skies? If so, the wonder you felt is similar to the wonder you will feel reading Love Chronicles of the Octopodes, every page of which astounds and abounds with dazzling lyricism, narrative innovation, and prose textures movingly evocative of otherworldly sentience. With ingenuity and care, Karen An-hwei Lee incorporates research on cephalopods, black holes, genome editing, and the life and work of Emily Dickinson into sublime experimentations with language and genre. The result is art—and the art is powerfully transformative. To be submerged in the gorgeous songfulness of Karen An-hwei Lee’s science fiction is to find oneself metamorphosing into a novel life form. I woke up from the dreamscapes of this book with exclamation marks in my brain and a new, tentacular, bioluminescent sense of possibility.
—Seo-Young Chu, author of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation

Is there anyone in the literary universe who quite writes, sounds or undulates like Karen An-Hwei Lee? If David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress were spliced with My Octopus Teacher and Rachel Carson’s Sea Trilogy, it might come close to producing Emily, an inquisitive, “accidental” octopus with a penchant for spice cake and philosophical ruminations on the fate of rogue genomes and the enigma that is our souls. Singular and shimmering.
—Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of Activities of Daily Living

Praise for Karen An-hwei Lee

Lee resides intimately in the space between languages, geographies, and temporalities… The verbal and the sensual are fused under her supple pen, and you will marvel at her capacity to animate words, releasing them from habit and predictability into buoyancy.
—Mary Caponegro

I heed Lee’s voice for the alarm it sounds in advance of a catastrophe as real and troubling as the San Andreas Fault and hail it for the beauty…
—Norman Lock

Ms. Lee, a poet, encapsulates [Kafka’s] reflections with exquisite delicacy and grace.
—Wall Street Journal

Perhaps it takes a poet to dramatize the stark bargain Kafka struck in order to live on through literature, line by line and image by image…
—American Book Review

Lee’s strange and gemological arrangements are the measure of her gift…
—Heather McHugh

[S]imply exquisite…
—Rigoberto González

Karen An-hwei Lee lives in greater Chicago. She is the author of the novels The Maze of Transparencies and Sonata in K. Several of her recent poetry collections are Duress (Cascade Books), Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics (Slant Books), Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press), and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books). More information here.