"The Deer is luminous, sacred, mysterious—beautifully conceived, a first work of mesmerizing poignancy and power."—Carole Maso
Third Place Books welcomes Dashiel Carrera for a presentation of his striking debut novel The Deer. He will be joined in conversation by Evan Lavender-Smith. Please note: this event will take place at 6pm Pacific Time.
This event will be broadcast live on Zoom. Registering will provide you with a unique access link in an email. During the event, you can ask questions using the Q&A feature, or chat with fellow attendees. A recording of the event will be made available and emailed to all who register.
This author talk is free! You can sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book.
About The Deer. . .
The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits—what appears—to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence.
Praise for The Deer. . .
"The Deer is luminous, sacred, mysterious—beautifully conceived, a first work of mesmerizing poignancy and power."
—Carole Maso, author of The Art Lover
“Haunting, magnetic, compulsively beautiful, The Deer shines a dark light into uncertain corridors of mind and memory, into the churn of narrative itself. This book leaves an indelible impression, and with it Carrera makes a stunning debut.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
"In compelling, imagistic prose, The Deer builds up a world, takes it apart, then builds it up with different shapes in different skins. Carrera offers alternate but equally disturbing realities while having the courage not to declare one of them 'real'."
—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
"Haunted, haunting, Dashiel Carrera’s The Deer splits its central story into spliced reels, images moving characters back in time through memory and magical realism. At the core of this brilliant experimental novel is the question of sentience. What do humans and animals feel; how does blood bind us; what does it mean to remember the past if the past changes with the future. Structurally innovative and emotionally intense, The Deer inhabits a strange and magical literary landscape."
—Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and Sleep Tight Satellite
"Disorienting but heartfelt, fragmentary but immersive, Dashiel Carrera’s The Deer deftly melds the disorienting effects of existential crisis alongside the fever dreamscape of family memory into something like a new As I Lay Dying for the post-Disintegration Loops era."
—Blake Butler, author of Alice Knott
Dashiel Carrera is a writer, musician, and media artist from Massachusetts. He has released 5 albums on the label 75OrLessRecords and his writing appears or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, FENCE, BOMB, and others. He received his BA from Brown University in Literary Arts and is currently a PhD student in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto. The Deer is his first novel.
Evan Lavender-Smith is the author of From Old Notebooks and Avatar. The founding editor of Noemi Press, he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech.