With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous and the marvelous - as transmuted in the alembic of Rikki Ducornet's open-hearted vision - in literature, art, and film. For her, excess anomaly, and heterodoxy entice the imagining mind to embrace "otherness," enlarge the world, and regenerate Eden.

Ducornet playfully investigates works of literature, art, and film that create ruptures in our sense of normality. ...[She] shows how the road of excess indeed leads to the palace of wisdom. Most important, however, her ability to transfix and communicate her sense of wonder becomes wondrous in itself, making these essays read with the same quirky delight as her fiction."-Rain TaxiTable of Contents:

Waking to Eden
Optical Terror
The Impossible Genus
On Returning from Chiapas
Alphabets and Emperors
Optical Pleasure
Haunting by Water
Mapping Paris
The Monstrous and the Marvelous
The Death Cunt of Deep Dell
Sortilege
Books of Nature
A Dream
Manifesto in Voices
Acknowledgments
Bibliography