The Book of Embers
Kelly Puig
September 22, 2025
Winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, The Book of Embers reenvisions what a book can be—labyrinth, fugue, hologram of inquiry—to rewrite literary possibility from the inside out. Loosely guided by the musings of a modern-day Ariadne, this genre-defiant work traces the spiral path of language, lineage, and what it means to live at the edge of story, self, and structure. It braids fiction, essay, art history, and memoir into a thread that tunnels into the recursive nature of consciousness itself.
To open the book is to enter a psychic observatory, where Hilma af Klint maps a blueprint of inner vision, Georgia O’Keeffe distills form into feeling, and Yayoi Kusama installs her Infinity Mirror Room inside the text. Leonora Carrington rides through on the back of a beast, helping the book remember its animal body, while Etel Adnan teaches the sentence its tidal topography to redefine here. Around them flicker Borges, Bachelard, Carson, Cixous, Lispector, Pessoa—facets of a living prism. Ultimately, the book reveals itself to be burning flame and alchemical retort: a device that is also a process, a process that is also a person, transmuting endlessly.
“A brilliant weaver of historical and personal materials, Puig’s encyclopedic mind brings together a lineage of foremothers that includes artists, writers, inventors, scientists, and visionaries. Gathering gorgeous fragments in a layered exploration of the means through which we tell stories and through which stories tell us, Puig asks “which is more supernatural, the book as body or the body as book.” A commonplace book, a confessional, a cartography of family mystery, The Book of Embers glows with the arrival of the reader’s breath.”
— Amaranth Borsuk
“If Jung’s Red Book was a record of man’s descent into the mythic underworld of psyche—masculine, monumental, unfinished—then The Book of Embers is its long-awaited counterpart: a Purple Book, finally written by a woman. Where Jung drew mandalas, Puig constructs vortexes; where he diagrammed archetypes, she dissolves into them. This is not analysis—it is alchemy, gnosis, and the feminine sublime writ large. This chronicle remakes descent into the unconscious, page by page, voice by voice, self by multiplying self. This is the sacred document of a visionary mind unbound.”
— Buffy Barfoot
“An innovation of both the book object and of what one is able to do with fiction… One often reads with hope, or looking for hope. We think, at the end of this I will see, or I will feel or I will imagine, but one of the pressing questions in The Book of Embers which keeps you riveted and takes your breath away is what if there are no ends, no boundaries, no closed spaces?”
— Renee Gladman
KELLY PUIG is a Cuban-American writer and interdisciplinary artist. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brown University where she was the recipient of the Weston Prize for best graduate work in addition to the Frances Mason Harris Prize for best manuscript of poetry or prose fiction written by a woman. Her cross-genre debut, The Book of Embers, was selected by Amaranth Borsuk for the Essay Press Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in A Mouth Holds Many Things (Fonograf Editions), Hyena (Hexentexte), Witness, Denver Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere.