Publisher's Synopsis
Fiction. MOUNT FUGUE explores how stories get told to us--through the news, through art, through bits of conversation, and through conjecture. J.I. Daniels pieces together the story of a tragic mountain-climbing expedition through different mediums and voices. This expedition is a historic one; it is the first led by a woman and a Latina. As Daniels tries to uncover the truth about what really happened up there, we discover along the way that the truth is less of a singular and more of a combination of truths.
To view and read JI Daniels' MOUNT FUGUE is to relinquish all expectations and begin--and begin again--to choose your own news story about Tara Ortiz, to choose your own answers to your own chosen questions about what business it ever was of hers--that wife, that mother, that Latina and African American corporate executive--to attempt to conquer anything, to attempt to conquer anything at all let alone the deadliest mountain in the world. --Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart
This has all the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident, all the jargon and wonder of a Jon Krakauer story, and it'll activate your narrative jigsaw compulsions as well--you can't help trying to piece together the puzzle, can't help wondering not just why and how and in what sequence, but who is even telling you all this? --Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels
JI Daniels is a mountaineer. Wonderfully, paradoxically, the mountain he summits is of his own creation--sheer, imposing, daunting. It says a great deal about his ambitions, intellect, and generous nature that he is up to the task of leading the reader into these constructed heights. MOUNT FUGUE is the best kind of novel--like a view from a high peak, it reveals the world you thought you knew from entirely different vantage. The world expands with startling clarity. And you realize that what you see in this clear light is yourself, but from a wonderfully unfamiliar perspective. --Alexander Parsons, author of Leaving Disneyland
