My Volcano

My Volcano is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a menagerie of characters, as they each undergo personal eruptions, while the Earth itself is constantly shifting. Parable, myth, science-fiction, eco-horror, My Volcano is a radical work of literary art, emerging as a subversive, intoxicating artistic statement by John Elizabeth Stintzi.

On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it’s nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.

As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.

With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.

* Winner of the Sator New Works Award.
* New York Public Library's "Best Books of 2022"
* Kirkus Reviews' "Best Fiction Books of 2022"
* 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, Longlist.
* "A Most Anticipated Book" —Lambda Literary, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Tor.com, The Chicago Review of Books, LGBTQReads, Ms. Magazine, The Mary Sue

"I will read anything that comes from JES’s twisted imagination and love it. This ingenious, insightful, unconventional and expansive eco-horror is no exception."
—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

"My Volcano, an ambitious, astonishing pageant of a book... This is also a book about contemporary estrangement and violence, about the wounds and hauntings of history, of climate collapse… I loved that the book felt like an explosive device injected into our current era—and into history itself—and detonated. I loved the bombast of the book, the feeling that I was tearing through time and space while reading it, the mystery of how all the pieces fit together, the remarkable and unrelenting presence of each rendered moment."
—Lauren Markham, 2023 Tournament of Books (The Morning News)

"There is nothing I can write about this book that will capture the whole of it. It is a piece of surreal and beautiful art that defines categorization and explanation. In June of 2016, a massive volcano begins growing in Central Park. From there, a disjointed but beautifully symphonic narrative emerges, as characters all over the world begin to experience strange events. Somehow, in writing about giant bugs and time travel and weird escape rooms and magical bees, Stintzi has hit on some essential truth about what it feels like to be a human on this bizarre, heartbreaking, ever-changing, impossible planet."
—Laura Sackton, BookRiot

"The premise of My Volcano is weird and wonderful: one day in 2016, a growth sprouts up in Central Park. Over the next few weeks, it gets bigger and bigger and is ultimately determined to be a volcano. Against this backdrop, Stintzi weaves a kaleidoscope of stories showing the mundane, momentous, and increasingly bizarre ways Manhattan’s newest resident creeps into the lives of a variety of characters."
—Allison McNearney, The Daily Beast

"One of the most exhilarating [novels] I’ve read in years."
—Abeni Jones, Autostraddle

"A fever dream that whirs together homicide statistics from 2016 with an array of outlandish science fiction tropes. An allegory about the mutability of all things. An unsettling meditation on the 21st century’s strange reality. An apocalyptic phantasmagoria where bizarre kaiju roam the lands and wreak havoc. A lyrical treatise on volcanoes as metaphors. A wild ride. Future students of My Volcano... will offer myriad theses about the true nature of the author’s stupendous book. The unfettered abundance, uniqueness and irreducibility of My Volcano will likely encourage as many interpretations as the book has readers."
—Brett Josef Grubisic, The Toronto Star

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a non-binary writer who grew up on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has been awarded the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and The Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize. Their writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Poetry, and many others. JES is the author of the novels My Volcano and Vanishing Monuments, as well as the poetry collection Junebat. They live with their wife in the United States.