Kree: A Post-Exotic Novel

A warrior struggles through an apocalyptic landscape and the world after death

Kree Toronto has been raised as a warrior in a ravaged world: postapocalyptic, posthuman, the population decimated by wars and civilization long since collapsed. After her attempt to avenge the death of her dog, Loka, goes horribly wrong, Kree finds herself lost in a world after death and wanders into the city of the terrible mendicants.

Under the Brothers' totalitarian rule, Kree can lead a quiet life and forget her violent past, even if needles grow in her skull and hallucinatory blood rains pour down now and then to remind her. She can make friends: a shamanic healer with a shaking tent, a mysterious stranger hatched from an egg, and a gruff Tibetan electrician in a world without electricity. And she can have her Loka as long as she toes the Party line and does as she's told. When she can't--when her friends start to disappear and the Brothers turn against her--Kree sets out on a quest, searching for a new way forward.

Multiply reincarnated and unstuck in time, Kree is the characteristically marvelous creation of Manuela Draeger, whose extraordinary stories, in the words of author China Miéville, "are as close to dreams as fiction can be."

Manuela Draeger is a member of the imaginary collective of post-exotic writers, along with Antoine Volodine, Lutz Bassmann, and Elli Kronauer, who have produced more than forty works so far in French. She works as a containment camp librarian and has written numerous books for children as well as for an adult audience. Works that have appeared in English include In the Time of the Blue Ball, translated by novelist Brian Evenson, and Eleven Sooty Dreams, translated by J. T. Mahany.

Lia Swope Mitchell has a PhD in French from the University of Minnesota. Her translations include Solo Viola by Antoine Volodine and Survival of the Fireflies by Georges Didi-Huberman, both published by the University of Minnesota Press. Her original fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Apex, Terraform, and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis.