Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

DAYSPRING

Anthony Oliveira

A singular, stunning debut that transcends and transfigures genre - at once a bold retelling of biblical tales and an unforgettable contemporary coming-of-age story, connected in collapsing time across millennia.

There are few love stories in the holy books. Love is what ruins. Love is what costs. Love is a flaming sword at our backs, a garden left to ruin and to wild. In DAYSPRING, Anthony Oliveira brings to vibrant, glorious life the gospel according to the disciple Christ loved - his companion in the days before the crucifixion, the only instrument that remembers with fidelity his sound. Sacred, profane, and rich with explicit desire and a poetic attention to form, Dayspring weaves electric and heart-wrenching stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time, one that re-examines and re-frames great and doomed figures from scripture and history, even as it casts its keen eye on the trials of modern life. Seamlessly blending fiction, memoir, and verse in the exhilarating tradition of Anne Carson and Madeline Miller, DAYSPRING is an immersive, mesmerizing work, one that wrenches beauty from cataclysm and finds bliss in apocalypse. Anthony Oliveira is a three-time National Magazine and two-time GLAAD award-winning author, film programmer, pop culture critic, and PhD. His work is in a myriad of genres, often incorporating queer themes, and spans comics, prose, journalism, and academic research. His first novel, Dayspring, is forthcoming from Strange Light Press in 2024, and his YA graphic novel project Apocrypha is announced from Harper Alley. He has written for Marvel Comics (on the Young Avengers and X-Men).

Available products
Book Published 2024-04-02 by Strange Light (PRH Canada)

Comments

Astonishingly beautiful and unrepentantly sexy, this is a book that is sure to both heal and challenge its readers in all the most important ways. To open its pages is to open your heart to a vision of love that is as deeply, tragically, and courageously human as it is divine.

Dayspring is a grand experiment of language and queer love that succeeds on every level. Oliveira's prose is heartfelt and poignant, climbing to grand heights while weaving in his quieter moments of fresh and sly dialogue. The love in this book is the sacred made flesh and genuine, relatable in a way scripture rarely touches. In short, this is a masterpiece.

What can one say about a masterpiece? Bracing and breathtaking, it is a glorious gift to the soul and the senses. This is a magnificent debut!

In a masterful display of literary experimentation that explodes the boundary between verse and prose and that shuttles its readers between pre- and postmodernity, Dayspring highlights the eroticism of the Christian mystical tradition and, like Hadewijch, Mechthild, and Teresa before it, teaches that ecstatic love can be both joyful and excruciatingly painful, sacred and profane, human and divine.