Ad Hoc Fiction is honoured to be publishing the everrumble, “a small novel in small forms” by Michelle Elvy. It’s a wonderful and important work of fiction highly praised by the writers quoted below. The striking cover art is by acclaimed Ethiopian artist, Eyayu Genet.
“the everrumble is a poetic imagining of intense focus and sweeping ideas. Zettie’s story is fluid and in motion, transcending geographies and time. She stops talking, at age seven, and starts to listen – to the worlds she finds in language and books, and to the people and places she encounters as she moves across continents. Her silence connects her to people, to nature and to the elemental world. Magical and beyond boundaries, this collection focuses on small fragments, taking Zettie, and the reader, inevitably to the place where human history began.”
the everrumble was launched at the Flash Fiction Festival, UK on 28th-30th June where Michelle ran workshops, chaired a panel on Flash Around the World, introduced the latest Best Small Fiction anthology, and talked about flash fiction in New Zealand. It is for sale at the Ad Hoc Fiction bookshop in paperback in several different currencies and in Kindle ebook format via Amazon.
What other writers say about the everrumble:
“A tour de force, Michelle Elvy’s the everrumble is a profound, poetic constellation of notes on the Earth’s ‘alive noises’, the hope that lives in the natural world. Zettie’s story – all her moments of evolving, her capacity to listen, and her gift of becoming all the sounds of the earth – affected me to the core.”
Christopher Allen, author of Other Household Toxins
“Michelle Elvy’s acute prose wraps her silent heroine in ‘layers of remembered sound’, each linked fiction transmitting a luminous sense of the ‘loud world’ which vibrates her nerve-endings, and tracing her course through a life alert to strange frequencies of experience. the everrumble is a story of listening which makes sound ‘touch down’ under our scalps, taking our senses on a journey of ‘orchestral movement’.”
Tracey Slaughter, author of deleted scenes for lovers, 2014 Bridport Prize winner
“Michelle Elvy’s the everrumble is an infused and accomplished accumulation of being. The language dances through the reader, elucidating concepts of time and sound and place. In Zettie, acutely conveyed, Elvy gives us a loving homage to our beleaguered planet.”
Catherine McNamara, author of The Cartography of Others
“With a keen poetic sensibility, the everrumble draws the reader into worlds woven with fluidity through time and place. Here is a stunningly original novella crackling with an inner and outer expansive life. These linked stories are rife with an elegant gravitas and a unique approach to what is possible once those doors of perception are swung open and one can see, hear, and feel what awaits on the other side.”
Robert Scotellaro, author of What We Know So Far and Bad Motel
“What do you hear when you choose to stop speaking? In this glorious and small-but-enormous book, we meet Zettie, born into a cacophonous world with a talent for perceiving sounds too quiet, too far and too deep for the rest of us – including the everrumble. Elvy paints a dreamy, powerful portrait of the life and travels of this word-collector and thinker who becomes celebrated as a visionary, not for seeing but listening. the everrumble will leave you filled with questions about what we miss by not paying attention, by filling up the silences.”
Tania Hershman, author of Some Of Us Glow More Than Others.
Michelle Elvy is a writer and editor based in New Zealand, meandering aboard her sailboat, Momo, for more than fifteen years and currently completing a circumnavigation. She edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Blue Five Notebook; she is also Assistant Editor for the Best Small Fictions series and Reviews Editor for takahē. In 2018, she co-edited Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, travel writing and reviews have been widely published, most recently in The Feminine Divine (2019), New Micro (2018), Manifesto: 1o1 Political Poems from Aotearoa New Zealand (2017) and Borderlands & Crossroads: Writing the Motherland (2016).
