The Monk and the Butterfly
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The Monk and the Butterfly is a set of six fictional stories ranging in length, experimenting with different narrative structures and techniques, which examine and explore the idea of the human self as a fictional story. This creative work seeks to deliberately transgress the boundaries of genre within literature and evoke the sense of non-empirical, ecstatic, or poetic truth in the mind of the reader. In doing so it mingles and remixes ideas of dystopian and utopian, cyberpunk and zombies, fairy tales and scientific inquiry, multiphrenia and recursion, mythology and ontology, copyright and copyleft, media theory and queer theory, feminism and transhumanism, genderfuck and genrefuck, rejection of binaries and absence of identity. The stories range in subject matter including the larvae of the deathwatch beetle, a suicidal artificial intelligence, a woman made of bread, the eating of names, a global pandemic of sleep deprivation, and the end of the world.