Uncompromising, hypnotic and darkly humorous, Other Electricities charts a new and strange direction in American fiction. âLike Franklinâs discovery of the electricity we do know, Monsonâs luminous, galvanized book represents a paradigm shift. The frequencies of the novel have been scrambled and redefined by this elegant experiment. Other Electricities is a new physics of prose, a lyric string theory of charged and sparkling sentences. What a kite! What a key!ââMichael Martone âMonson is tuned in to our crackling, chaotic, juiced-up times like no other young writer I know. Other Electricities is necessary reading.ââRobert Olen Butler Meet âYr Protagonistâ: radio amateur, sometime vandal and âat times, perhaps the authorâ of Monsonâs category-defying collection: I know about phones. While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency and listen to his voice . . . we would give up and go out in the snow with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on othersâ conversations. Thereâs something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors. . . . The cumulative effect of this stunningly original collection seems to work on the reader in the same wayâwe follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Michiganâs Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves and electricity are characters in themselves, affecting a community held together by the memories of those they have lost. Ander Monson is the editor of DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Michigan. Tupelo Press recently published his poetry collection, Elegies for Descent and Dreams of Weather.