10: 01 Paperback – April 8, 2017

This book is not for everyone, but it's nonetheless amazing. Sometime hilarious, sometimes tragic, consistently thought provoking and beautiful.Oh, and strange. Very, very strange, mixing bits of fabulism and the fantastic with cold, gritty reality, and mundane reality, and a healthy dose of lingual spice. Olsen plays on the page like no one else.

Lance Olsen is a skilled, established author of postmodern narrative, and his latest book, 10:01, sees him flexing his pecs and pointing at the crowd like a true literary Hulkamaniac. This experimental, stream-of-consciousness novel documents the disjointed, mediatized lives of an audience of movie-goers. It is a record of their conscious and unconscious experience as they wait just one tick past ten minutes for a film to begin. In this seemingly static, uneventful period of time, Olsen's sharp wit and imagination explode onto the screen of the page, creating a pastiche of worlds, fantasies and desires that together constitute today's postmodern scene.Building on the work of the Frankfurt school, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard and William S. Burroughs, 10:01 represents reality as a film and the human condition as a pathological production of the mediascape. Each chapter is a short, detailed illustration of some form of mental or physical trauma. These illustrations are mere fragments of experience, existing independently of one another, but also plugged into the universe of fragments that surrounds them. Set in a movie theater located in the Mall of America, a universal emblem of pathological commodity-capitalist culture in the 21st century, the book moves freely between the diegetic reality of the movie theater, the action on the movie screen (i.e. previews), and the action on the mind's screens of Olsen's many characters, whose variable identities are defined by distant memories and potential futures as much as the present moment. The stitched-together narrative structure of 10:01 appropriately reflects its content: the increasingly ultraviolent schizophrenic body of the Americanized world.Olsen breaths life into this body with vastly original flair, insight and precision. The hyperreal dreamscape imagined here is particularly reminiscent of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin's idea of the 19th century Parisian arcades, a derivative site of spectacular consumer society. Benjamin's The Arcades Project is a montage of notes, images and citations that serve as a map of the dawning capitalist unconscious. 10:01, in comparison, can be read as a map of the twilight of the capitalist unconscious as we continue to move into a new postcapitalist social, psychological, ideological, ontological and metaphysical space. The book is one of the first texts to effectively enter into this as-of-yet uncharted territory. Satirical, existential and theoretical, 10:01 offers a unique, compelling look at the individual and collective human psyche as produced by the technocapitalist machine.

Lance Olsen's 10:01 is amazing. First of all, it's totally innovative and different from anything else I've read (and I've read a lot of novels!) It paints a picture of Middle America that's totally unsentimental and contemporary. It's multicultural, multilingual and multigenerational. I love the way he uses language - each character feels totally distinct without the trappings of more conventional storytelling. I think my favorite thing about the book, though, is its gritty, unflinching, character portraits - these people are so naked and their lives are so full of violence and pain and longing, but warmth and humor saves them from feeling bleak. Olsen shows us the very flawed nature of his characters, but he never gives up on them.If you want to read something really exciting and interesting and probably different from anything you've read before, check out 10:01.the interactive web version is also cool - I'm a book purist by nature and tend to be suspicious of thngs like this but I was pleasantly surprised. The graphics are great and it really captures the feel of the novel without being reductive or obvious.(...)

WHAT A GAS to read...finally a coherent and articulate lens on "the audience" and its effects. This is a terrific set of shifting heads--meaning roving point of view shifts--which utterly atomizes and fragments the movie goer's experience only to recollect it in a shot-reverse shot screening. WOW. Read this book before you go to see your next movie. It shows you how the movie going experience is axiomatic for America (and capitalism, and individualism, and commodification, and identity dissolution, and and and).

I read a short piece by Lance Olsen in The &Now Awards. I loved it there so I went looking for more and was not disappointed. A great read!

No one has linked this, so I might as well, here. If you like the author's work, you have to check out the interactive version of this novel at his web site. Way cool:[...]Excellent introduction into the mind of an amazing and challenging writer

What an extraordinary and extraordinarily well-executed idea -- rippling with arresting perceptions punctuated by chuckles, chortles and belly laughs. And here's the thing: ten minutes in a movie house before the show begins, and guess what? You're the show, baby! Dig us!TEK

"Lance Olsen radiates the genetic engineering screensaver of a cyber drug fetus." - Kenji Siratori, author Blood Electric

j'ai donne cette note parce que j'aime ce qui est differant . la vrai litterature se fout des regles et des "lecteurs" de musso, levy et autres ecrivaillons