2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST!

Translated from the French, Phototaxis is a fragmentary, darkly-humorous, and apocalyptic novel from a leading young voice from Montreal from Montreal centered around questions of friendship, the commodification of globalized tragedy, ecological crisis, the griefs of migration, and the possibility of political coherence in today’s world.

In a city mysteriously overflowing with meat, a museum is bombed, a classical piano player hooked on snuff films throws himself off a building, a charismatic but misled political organizer has disappeared, and a young immigrant navigates a crumbling continent. In the fallout of their friendship, Olivia Tapiero’s Phototaxis deploys a fugal language at turns surreal, scathingly comic, poetic, and revolutionary to dismantle our world and construct one even closer to its breaking point, or further along in its breaking. Here, voice and event surge up like reflux from the exhausted throats of nature and urban spaces, sounding out an architecture of failure within a suspiciously steady rise of fascism and its persistent counterpoints. A dystopic work of hope that carries its own disintegration, Phototaxis (translated by Kit Schluter) is Tapiero’s first novel to appear English.

Olivia Tapiero's profile page

Kit Schluter's profile page

Olivia Tapiero is a writer and translator. She has published Les murs (2009), Espaces (2012), Phototaxie (2017) and Rien du tout (2021), and has co-edited Chairs (2019). She is a literary director at Moebius, and has contributed to magazines such as Tristesse, Estuaire, Relations and Liberté. She lives in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal).
Kit Schluter is a poet-translator & bookmaker living in Mexico City. His poetry & stories have appeared in Boston Review, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Folder, Hyperallergic, and in the chapbooks Inclusivity Blueprint, Journals, Translations of Forgetting, Without is a Part of Origin, and the newly released collections of stories and drawings, 5 Cartoons/5 caricaturas (tr. Mariana Rodríguez, Juan Malasuerte Editores) and The Good in Having a Nuclear Family (Despite Editions). Soon to be published is a bilingual edition of the story An Umbrella (translated as Un paraguas by Daniel Saldaña París for Joven Club Werther in Mexico City). Among his published and forthcoming translations from the French, Occitan, and Spanish are books by Olivia Tapiero (Phototaxis, Nightboat) Anne Kawala (Screwball, Canarium), Jaime Saenz (The Cold, Poor Claudia), Michel Surya (Dead End, Black Sun Lit), Julio Torri (Essays & Poems, Archivo48), Marcel Schwob (The Book of Monelle; The Children's Crusade, foreword by J.L. Borges, & The King in the Golden Mask, Wakefield Press), Amandine André (Circle of Dogs with Jocelyn Spaar; Some Thing, with Lindsay Turner, Aphonic Space), and Clamenç Llansana (Goliard Songs, Anomalous), with others on the way. Completed translations of Pierre Alferi's Chercher une phrase, in collaboration with Anna Moschovakis. He is recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in translation, a Glascock Prize, and a "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize, and holds an MFA in poetry from Brown University. Kit co-edits O'clock Press, designs for Nightboat Books and Juan Malasuerte Editories, and with Tatiana Lipkes organizes the monthly reading series at Aeromoto, a public arts library in Mexico City. The series will soon be anthologized bilingually by Ediciones Gato Negro and UNAM/the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and E.M. Wolfman in Oakland, CA.

“A museum bombing, a missing political organizer and a classical piano player who jumps off a building illuminate a city filled with dystopia and hope."—The New York Times

“Phototaxis, by the Canadian writer Olivia Tapiero, is a novel that oozes, much like the rotting meat strewn across its unnamed cityscape."—The Paris Review

“Canadian writer Tapiero’s narratively opaque but politically acute English-language debut… is a confrontational but eminently quotable text. This cyclone of art, destruction, and nonconformity impresses.”—Publishers Weekly

“Apocalypses are never something we wish for—they’re hands we’re dealt. Phototaxis shows us how we might play them.”—Cleaver Magazine

"Allusive, polyvocal, dreamlike—Phototaxis is a haunting collection of responses to crisis: that of ecological decay and disturbance, political and social repression, wealth inequality, and existence itself."—PRISM International

"Tapiero represents the modern Western city through a stream of consciousness interiority that toggles between multiple characters. Like the best modernist prose, she shows us both the objecthood of people and the way in which external objects manifest a latent social subjectivity."—Air/Light Magazine

"How might we live in a world so full of contempt for us? How might we love each other in a smouldering cityscape where we are nothing but flickering lights over black waters, parasites, hosts, forgetful martyrs, prisoners staving off state-sanctioned cannibalism? War is never declared, yet its victims are innumerable. Bodies fall, pianos gather dust, governments collect data and impose curfews. Meat rots in the street, innocence is always a lie. We flagellate ourselves by the side of the highway in hopes of forgetting forgetting itself. Every cause is already lost, and every disappearance is wholly devoid of poetry. Nevertheless, despite everything, in the darkness, Narr still sings her song of light. Tapiero’s dizzying chronicle of beauty and horror is exquisitely rendered here in Schluter’s ethereal yet precise translation."—Simon Brown

"Olivia Tapiero’s virtuosic Phototaxis reverses the purgative gesture of necrophoresis: every sentence is shot through with the stench of carrion and the death rattle of capital’s circulation. Reading the text, one feels the vertigo of an interminable fall refracted in an infinity mirror of the commodified image. Tapiero’s haunting lyricism, atmospherically rendered in Kit Schluter’s translation, will ring out in your skull long after reading the book’s final word: music."—Jackie Wang

“Olivia Tapiero’s Phototaxis propels us through exploding whales, ‘silky little bodies,’ oceans ‘gorged with toxic oysters,’ dazzling despair and seeping song. In Kit Schluter’s lush yet exacting translation, three figures navigate life in a collapsing world of crumbling language and intact borders. As this symphony of ruin reaches its crescendo, we realize this world might just be our own.”—Emma Ramadan