It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A tale for our dispossessed times, and one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love.

'Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.' — Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun, 'It Lasts Forever is sad, shocking, funny, prophetic, visceral, and deeply human. From amid the dislocations, the lacerations, a profound meditation arises. Highly recommended.' — Jeff VanderMeer, author of Dead Astronauts, ‘Crepuscular and gradual, minimal and tender, the words and photographic poems in Anne de Marcken’s The Accident are filled with measured, continuous, indestructible longing.... she has a quiet way of making you surrender, ecologically and aesthetically, through her account’s transient, fugitive beauty and explicit interlacing dormant fragility.’ — Vi Khi Nao, author of Human Tetris (praise for The Accident), 'The Accident takes place in that gap between seeing and feeling, feeling and knowing, ‘a bird trapped inside your head’ and ‘something brighter than fear.’ Lunar in its hold and its hope, this is a book that reaches through trauma to uncover memory as an end and a beginning. With its deft shifts in perspective, its images at once soothingly atmospheric and hauntingly specific, The Accident gestures toward a dream where intimate claustrophobia gives way to a landscape that shifts with the imagination.' — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Sketchtasy (praise for The Accident), 'This book haunted me. Moving back and forth between image and text, between page and screen via QR code and fragment, I was reminded of the ghostly effect I get from looking at stereograms. Focus on its pieces in the right mood, and a third, composite text emerges that jumps off the page. The Accident was an uneasy and pleasurable reading experience that remained bright in my mind well after putting it down.' — Ander Monson, author of I Will Take the Answer (praise for The Accident)

Anne de Marcken lives in the United States on unceded land of the Coast Salish people. She is the founding editor and publisher of The 3rd Thing.