Named a Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and New York Public Library
Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library’s Book Prize for Fiction
Awarded the Sator New Works Award
Published in English March 2022 by:
Two Dollar Radio in the US
Arsenal Pulp Press in Canada/Commonwealth
In Translation:
Published in Italian in 2023 by: Edizioni Tlon
Published in Spanish in 2024 by: Cielo Santo
What people are saying…
Reviews:
“That Stintzi keeps all these plates spinning is a wonder; that they transform the chaotic present into a fiery, transcendent vision of the future is even more impressive. It’s a brilliant achievement.”
—Starred Review, Publishers Weekly
“A vibrant ecosystem of a novel that deals honestly with the beauty and horror of human and ecological connectedness.”
“one of the most exhilarating [novels] I’ve read in years.”
—Abeni Jones, Autostraddle
“Future students of My Volcano, the sophomore novel of John Elizabeth Stintzi (Vanishing Monuments), will offer myriad theses about the true nature of the author’s stupendous book. The unfettered abundance, uniqueness and irreducibility of Volcano will likely encourage as many interpretations as the book has readers.”
—Brett Josef Grubisic, Toronto Star
“[T]he novel gives us a funhouse mirror of ourselves and our society: entertaining, thought-provoking, and purposefully strange. The volcano—any of our volcanoes—always threatens to overwhelm, demanding our attention. The question remains what, if anything, we will do about it.”
—Nathaniel Drenner, starred review
for Independent Book Review
“My Volcano is difficult to write about because on one hand it’s this large, sprawling story, and on the other it’s intimate and personal. The supernatural elements knock you back because they’re so vivid and engaging, its cinematic scope is tethered to an emotional core that carries us through. It has barbs that dug into me, and I wasn’t sure which way it was going to whip me from section to section—and while I felt like I was missing something or forgetting important elements the whole time—it had me hooked and I was all the way in.”
—Joseph Edwin Haeger, The Big Smoke
“Nonbinary author Stintzi’s science fiction / eco-horror novel is an ambitious, global tale that begins with the discovery of an emergent volcano in Central Park. An eclectic group of characters, from Mexico City, Tokyo, Nigeria, Greece, Mongolia, and more grapple with their personal changes and transformations as the earth undergoes its own.”
—Casey Stepaniuk, Autostraddle
Endorsements:
“My Volcano is a fast-paced, gripping, singular novel that belongs to the new wave of eco-horror yielding to no conventions.”
—Fernando A. Flores, author of
Tears of the Trufflepig
“With the panoramic scope and astute sharpness of Samanta Schweblin's Little Eyes and the eerie chill of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, John Elizabeth Stintzi's My Volcano immediately grabs you by the shirt and doesn't let you go. Structured like a spiral moving through time and space, and deftly mixing history and myth and vision with poetic prose, this dread-inducing book will keep you up at night until you get to its last devastating, but ultimately, I think, hopeful line.”
—Alicia Elliott, bestselling author of
A Mind Spread Out On the Ground
“A kaleidoscopic, contemporary folktale with added acerbic juice, like when Dylan went electric. Stintzi somehow funnels the tumultuous present into a sprawling novel of collision and connection that’s both timely and timeless. This is very weird shit indeed.”
—Hazel Jane Plante, author of
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)
On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock is spotted by a jogger growing from the Central Park Reservoir. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it’s nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.
As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.
With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.
MAJOR VULCANA (set of 22 tarot “major arcana” style cards, designed using content from the book)
