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. 'We need writers to look at difficult issues in a sophisticated manner. Ducornet has done this. She is a mirror of our innermost selves and she gives us back to outselves. Despairing, hopeful, active, contemplative, fractured but surviving, playful, even happy sometimes (in our cash), whole.' --The Nation '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.
