It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over asks how much of yourself can you lose before you are lost…and then what happens?
The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, our undead narrator notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. She has forgotten even her name, but she remembers with unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known — where she loved and was loved. She heads west and into mind-boggling adventures, carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest.
The joint winner of The Novel Prize, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a sharp and funny tale for our dispossessed times.
‘Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.’ — Alexandra Kleeman
‘Anne de Marcken must write in a charmed ink that first erases the line between the living and the dead, and then — with prose as elegant as it is spooked — tells the story of what lies underneath. I have never read anything like this brilliant debut.’ — Sabrina Orah Mark
Anne de Marcken is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and publisher. She is author of The Accident: An Account (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Her second book, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, was the joint winner of The Novel Prize in 2023 and will be published in 2024 by Giramondo Publishing, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions. She has received award recognition across disciplines, including fellowships from Artist Trust, Millay Colony for the Arts, the Jentel Foundation and Centrum. She lives on the unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, Washington, where she works as editor and publisher of the small, innovative press The 3rd Thing.
