Big thanks to Marcus Pactor and Heavy Feather Review for the engaging conversation with Lance Olsen about An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies (Dzanc Books)!

Pactor praises Olsen as “one of America’s most formally inventive and intellectually stimulating novelists” and highlights the novel’s “charming and often hilarious” narration, striking imagery, and intricate narrative loops. Olsen discusses Henry Darger’s radical interiority, the speculative reimagining of a life obscured by history, and how experimental prose and images unsettle our ideas of identity, memory, and reading itself. As Olsen observes, “no sentence is merely itself, but rather through its structure (not just content) a mode of perception, belief, theorization, being-in-the-world.”

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