Alter Alter - by Toti O'Brien (Paperback)

About the Book

Alter Alter is a collection of short stories bridging views of the real and the surreal while they spiral around a central theme of otherness.

Book Synopsis

This book is a collection of short stories, articulated in 7 sections. Cassandra is about vision. A "premonition." It is loosely related to neuro difference, mental illness, mental states often considered "altered." Hell is about death (as an ultimately altered state), but not only. Also about our imaginary of the afterlife, especially about the figure of the devil/demon, the idea of evil. Mozart, a section about love, declined by a number of different love stories, some happy some not, some complex, some linear. In Color is also about love, but from a child's point of view. It is about childhood. I should say girlhood. About coming of age, but it goes backwards and closes upon infant memories. Alter Alter contains the title story, and it focuses on the main theme of the book. It contains several stories of sisterhood, either biological or not. All the stories in Long Distance add to the relationship with the other an element of displacement and remoteness. Drift amplifies the distance and resumes a surreal tone, similar to that of the first section.

Review Quotes

"There's no path, no stairs, no trail, no slope, nothing. Just a void ... will it allow my passage? How does emptiness hold?" In the highly unusual

pieces that comprise Alter Alter, Toti O'Brien's narrators stumble through a fog of crepuscular consciousness. These explorative ficciones, these multi-layered mini-voyages recounted in a staccato style, manage to travel from O'Brien's mind to the reader's, where they grope anew for stability and safe harbor in an era that provides neither.

Alex M. Frankel, author of Birth Mother Mercy