Teaching Notes for Unset
Use in the classroom to discuss: bodies of water; routes, paths, wayfinding; writing as a winnowing activity; writing as a widening activity; disappearances; misapprehensions; (mis)communications; dream-logic; doorways; limbs; longings; silence as object; phrasal time-markers; memory; remembrances; containment devices; confession; interrogation; eavesdropping; body parts; glossiness as an aesthetic; glassiness as an aesthetic; ripple effects; photographs; mirrors; insects; mimicries; surface tension. 
 
Pairs well with Remove to Play; Reports; Dante’s Cartography; What I Remember of My Love Affair with the Bird & Other Stories

Unset by Alice Mercier

$10.00

Quantity

72 pages.

Perfect bound.

In Unset, Alice Mercier documents the kinds of conversations that occur between kerb and cobblestone. Here is the white insect in salt; the extended limb in light; the dreamed woman in the moment after movement, digging in soil and then still. Here is the hanging gauze of memory; here is the blackened print; here is the wakewater, churning in every available container. What remains when one is left behind? What is it to resist the thrust of the inevitable? From observation and unblunted memoir, Mercier makes a five part map, allowing us access the unquiet undersides that swell beneath every blue surface.
Mercier knows how to find the perfect phrase. Her characters are startlingly alive; we catch them in the middle of the often bristling quiet of everyday existence—watching TV, burning breakfast, watching the neighbor, always with the underlying sense of the extraordinary, like a landing spaceship, as one character describes opening a fridge. Mercier’s characters notice everything, and on every page, the reader finds the kind of emotional resonance which, juxtaposed against the stories’ everyday worlds, makes each vignette in this collection seem to jump up off the page and into life.

-Nneoma Ike-Njoku

Alice Mercier's Unset is a masterclass in fiction. Somehow understated yet lush, her writing belies the work put into it, the depth of thought and command of language, like a placid river hiding roiling currents, ready to pull you under in an instant. Each sentence, paragraph, and story manages to surprise while feeling entirely inevitable, like it emerged fully formed, a string of pearls. Absolutely gorgeous.

-Carlos Rafael Gomez

Unset by Alice Mercier

Volume 48

About the Author

Praise for Unset