Murmur [Paperback]

Laura Mullen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 2006

Wildly absorbing, Murmur is a gorgeous genre-bender: detective novel, film noir and memoir (and the autopsy of all three), tricked out with bloody mirrors, blue murder, mutable coffins, loopy interrogations and a dead bombshell's shoes. This is one fabulous book! -- Rikki Ducornet Laura Mullen floods the confines of the 'detective novel' with all possible events, all murderers and all murdered so that, at any point in the narrative, everything has happened and everyone has done it. Murmur is a further-fiction of displacement and testimony that calls us to the task of deciding not only whether we would or would not do a thing but also whether we even know the difference between the two. A gripping exploration into the brutality of our time that you will not soon forget. -- Renee Gladman

Editorial Reviews

Review

One reads murder mysteries both as an escape and to discover who perpetrated the crime the satisfaction of closure. Murmur thwarts each of these desires... the way in which the murder, discovery of the body, evidence, and ongoing investigation recur and continually alter the narrative creates a psychosocial monster story: "She looked up from the book she was reading: corpses littered every page".... Begin wherever, obsess, overhear, worry, swoon. In revising the detective formula, Mullen invents a hybrid form that releases the gothic horrors of the present, exposing how they intrude into and mangle our private wars. Dip into it and revel; read it and unravel. --BOOKFORUM APRIL/MAY 2007

About the Author

Laura Mullen is on the Creative Writing Program faculty at Louisiana State University. She is the author of four previous books: her first collection of poems, The Surface (1991), was a National Poetry Series selection; her second, After I Was Dead (1999), was selected for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. The Tales of Horror was published by Kelsey St. Press in 1999. Subject was published by University of California Press in 2005 and her prose has appeared in the anthologies Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action (Coffeehouse Press) and Paraspheres (Omnidawn). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Prize and several MacDowell Colony Fellowships.

Product Details

• Paperback: 151 pages
• Publisher: Futurepoem; 1st edition (August 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097168006X
• ISBN-13: 978-0971680067
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #253,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A one-of-a-kind narrative experience., August 6, 2007

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Murmur (Paperback)

Award-winning author Laura Mullen presents Murmur, a murder-mystery told in a blend of prose and poetry, featuring a refractive perspective on space-time - amid the medley of infinite cosmic possibilities, the tale is told in such a manner that at one time or another everyone has committed the murder and everyone has been the victim. Merging the mystery, poetry, film noir, and fictional memoir genres, Murmur captivates the reader with its nuances of fallible human detail. "There's a woman lying naked on the blood-stained sand, in her abdomen the exact wound so vividly described as given to her ex-husband, metaphorically of course, by her request for money - specifically, for child support. 'She's sticking a knife in my gut,' he said, backing up and holding clenched fists to his stomach, 'and twisting it.'" A one-of-a-kind narrative experience.