"Imaginative … intelligent … thought-provoking."
—American Book Review
"Olsen's writing is always sharp and vibrant."
—Rain Taxi
Hideous Beauties is a collection of a dozen fictions exploring the nexus where image and language kiss.
Each of ten pieces in it is based on a photograph, painting, sketch, collage, or assemblage by an artist of the strange: Hans Bellmer, Ed Kienholz, Joel-Peter Witkin, Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Dorthea Lange, Leonardo da Vinci, John William Waterhouse, Hugo Simberg, Paul Delvaux.
In the universe called Hideous Beauties, death is a village of mermaids, millennial sex a radical form of digestion, and suburbia a hunchbacked dwarf at your door who just won't go away.
