Fiction. In a state-sponsored laboratory for art and life praxes, a guest observer finds herself ineluctably drawn to a participant dedicated to portrayals. Their conversations, which traverse intricate, interconnected vignettes set across Europe, cohere into an enigmatic narrative of violence and betrayal. A broken eye, a glass blower beyond time, the self as a fractured process of documenting and changing by writing again--this lyrical, layered novel explores narrated personal history through the absences that determine it, mining the caves beneath every clause in which something untold takes place and everything thereafter is changed.

Popahna Brandes has written a lyrical, charmed novel of experimentalists whose projects are as elusive as their relationships and identities. IN AN I is finely grained at every scale, a beautifully curved and mysterious arc of eddying, poetic narrative.--Miranda Mellis

Elegantly wrought, enigmatic, with some beautiful and whimsical formal flourishes, IN AN I is a book that hovers and resonates long after the last page.--Carole Maso