Habilis by Alyssa Quinn
Lucy, a young woman with an uncertain past, finds herself thrust into a mysterious anthropology museum that converts into a disco club each night. Moving through its labyrinthine galleries, she tries to construct an origin story for herself and for her species. But as the night progresses, her grip on language and identity slips away until the exhibit captions rupture the text, transporting us to East Africa, where the lives of three people—British anthropologist Mary Leakey, an Indian indentured laborer building the Uganda Railway, and a curator with too many secrets—interweave to reveal the darker side of the search for origins.
Surreal, spiraling, and daringly innovative, Habilis is all at once a historical reconstruction, a psychological horror, a mystery, a ghost story, and a creation myth. But above all, it is a meditation on language, desire, and the stories we tell about ourselves—especially those that might unravel us.
Through a collage of museum exhibits and Lucy’s fractured memories, the narrative destabilizes the boundary between science and myth, reality and representation, and, ultimately, the very concept of origin itself.
Publication Date: Sept 13, 2022
Paperback: 216 pages
ISBN: 9781950539475
Also available as an eBook
Lucy, a young woman with an uncertain past, finds herself thrust into a mysterious anthropology museum that converts into a disco club each night. Moving through its labyrinthine galleries, she tries to construct an origin story for herself and for her species. But as the night progresses, her grip on language and identity slips away until the exhibit captions rupture the text, transporting us to East Africa, where the lives of three people—British anthropologist Mary Leakey, an Indian indentured laborer building the Uganda Railway, and a curator with too many secrets—interweave to reveal the darker side of the search for origins.
Surreal, spiraling, and daringly innovative, Habilis is all at once a historical reconstruction, a psychological horror, a mystery, a ghost story, and a creation myth. But above all, it is a meditation on language, desire, and the stories we tell about ourselves—especially those that might unravel us.
Through a collage of museum exhibits and Lucy’s fractured memories, the narrative destabilizes the boundary between science and myth, reality and representation, and, ultimately, the very concept of origin itself.
Publication Date: Sept 13, 2022
Paperback: 216 pages
ISBN: 9781950539475
Also available as an eBook
Lucy, a young woman with an uncertain past, finds herself thrust into a mysterious anthropology museum that converts into a disco club each night. Moving through its labyrinthine galleries, she tries to construct an origin story for herself and for her species. But as the night progresses, her grip on language and identity slips away until the exhibit captions rupture the text, transporting us to East Africa, where the lives of three people—British anthropologist Mary Leakey, an Indian indentured laborer building the Uganda Railway, and a curator with too many secrets—interweave to reveal the darker side of the search for origins.
Surreal, spiraling, and daringly innovative, Habilis is all at once a historical reconstruction, a psychological horror, a mystery, a ghost story, and a creation myth. But above all, it is a meditation on language, desire, and the stories we tell about ourselves—especially those that might unravel us.
Through a collage of museum exhibits and Lucy’s fractured memories, the narrative destabilizes the boundary between science and myth, reality and representation, and, ultimately, the very concept of origin itself.
Publication Date: Sept 13, 2022
Paperback: 216 pages
ISBN: 9781950539475
Also available as an eBook
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HABILIS
“Habilis is a brilliant literary kaleidoscope, in which fragments of human framing of our ‘natural history’ leap, jostle, abut, overlap, and all with a keen sense of entertaining and colorful storytelling! Maybe I’m exactly the perfect reader for this book, but I smiled, nodded, gasped, laughed, and felt the poignant sting of pathos the whole way. What’s one more Lucy to stand in for all that we don’t understand? What’s one more attempt to make sense of eons of evolution, or one evening’s adventures? The collapse of scale and time here is impressive and unwaveringly illuminating, even if only of shadows. Huzzah!” —Thalia Field, author of Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) and Personhood
“Flickering between taxa, Alyssa Quinn's unclassifiable book maps the shadows cast by the museum and the archive, pointing again and again "to that which isn't there." It imagines the tenseless ghosts who haunt the straight steel line of colonial logic and enacts a multi-directional movement that pleats time, the sentence, and meaning itself. Habilis is a record of bright fractures and irresolvable symbols, an anti-history, a poem that's a mirror, a stratigraphy of gaps.” —Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan and Field Glass
“‘In the archive, I forget my name.’ Alyssa Quinn's artful, nimbly-made novel is studded with vital archaisms, from the DNA-ribbon of Mitochondrial Eve, blurry in its vitrine, to the Poughkeepsie train station, a remnant of Victorian red-brick optimism plunked on the Empire line. The contemporary protagonist, orphaned as a toddler, has come unstuck from time, drifting between incidents in her own life and historical and pre-historical narratives unspooling from specimens and artefacts from the unsavory history of anthropology. As insight, connection, shame and regret trade places across axes of colonialism, sexism, racist exploitation and personal loss, Habilis considers what it means to have a human hand, and to use it to comfort or to harm, to point to what is and isn't there.” —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
“An ambitious and dynamic novel that collapses time and space, author and character, imagination and historical record, Alyssa Quinn's Habilis is a book about the affordances and limitations of language, museums, relationships, science, systems of classification, and—above all—storytelling. Here Quinn vacillates between fiction and fact with grace and nuance. Cerebral and sophisticated yet also full of pathos, Habilis is prismatic and shimmering with linguistic fervor, as much about Mary Leakey as it is about the ethics and aesthetics of what it means to compose a story -- and what remains in the wake of that act. A haunting and heartfelt debut.” —Lindsey Drager, author of The Archive of Alternate Endings
“With great intelligence, compassion, and confidence, Alyssa Quinn's Habilis dazzingly remixes the fossil record of sometimes anxious, frequently pernicious fictions we tell ourselves about our place in the world, about who is genetically suited to hold positions of power and privilege, and about how, under a patriarchal, imperial rubric, the body's evolving morphologies equate to social destiny. Quinn's ingenious concept and challenging imagination engagingly transform the museum of so-called natural history into a surreal and unsettling house of mirrors, its glass eyes and vitrines no longer capable of distorting the human subject they seek to define, but rather making newly visible generations of suppressed narratives of ambition, care, and desire that provide a fresh perspective on our species' pasts and possible futures.” —Michael Mejia, author of TOKYO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alyssa Quinn is the author of the prose chapbook Dante’s Cartography (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2019). She holds an MFA in creative writing from Western Washington University, and is currently at work on a PhD at the University of Utah, where she is also the senior prose editor for Quarterly West. Find her work at alysssaquinn.net.
