"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." --

Climate change, time travel, startup culture, and volcanic eruptions intertwine in this sui generis outing from Stinzi (Vanishing Monuments). Told in a series of buzzing numbered fragments, the narrative whirls around a volcano rising in Central Park that looks like Mount Fuji. As the volcano grows, Stintzi builds out the wide-ranging narrative with jump cuts to a Nigerian folklore scholar in Tokyo; Makayla Brooks, a staffer at the emotion-managing startup Easy-Rupt; Dzhambul, a nomadic herder in Mongolia; a white trans sci-fi novelist in Manhattan; and eight-year-old Angel Barros Vargas in Mexico City, punctuating the breaks between each section with entries listing the victims of hate crimes and police shootings in 2016, such as the Orlando nightclub attack and the killing of Henry Green in Ohio, "shot dead by undercover police after being taunted to pull his gun." Each protagonist meets an unexpected fate: Angel, transported to 1516, is possessed by a vengeful spirit during the Aztec Empire's collapse. Stung by a bee, Dzhambul becomes a hive mind that first consumes entire cities and then the entire Asian continent. And Makayla, the Easy-Rupt staffer, inhabits other bodies in dreams as she turns to stone