In "The Stain" Rikki Ducornet tells the story of a young girl named Charlotte, branded with a furry birthmark in the shape of a dancing hare, regarded as the mark of Satan. "Sadistic nuns, scatology, butchered animals, monkish rapists, and Satan" (Kirkus), as well as the village exorcist, inhabit this bawdy tale of perversion, power, possession, and the rape of innocence. Ducornet weaves an intricate design of fantasy and reality, at once surreal, hilarious, and terrifying.

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla, the young and free-spirited native woman who has become the love of his life. Meanwhile, his demented son Septimus is raised by his mother in prewar Europe, seething with hatred of the father who abandoned him. He rises to power in Nazi-occupied France, where he goes mad in an obsessive pursuit of racial purity. Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans. "Linguistically explosive and socially relevant, [her] works are solid evidence that Rikki Ducornet is one of the most interesting writers around ... We are living in an age of intellectual and emotional starvation that is largely without spirituality, cynical about social change and disconnected from the natural world. We need writers to look at these difficult issues in a sophisticated manner. Ducornet has done this. She is the mirror of our innermost selves. And she gives us back to ourselves—despairing, hopeful, active, contemplative, fractured but surviving, playful, even happy sometimes, and always whole ... Ducornet's villains have the best lines ... one only has to think of Hitler or PolPot or any of our assorted tyrants to know that Ducornet's figures are ... taken from life."— The Nation " Entering Fire displays a cheerfully gruesome audacity and an imagination both lively and bizarre."— The New York Times " Entering Fire is about the metaphoric and potentially evil properties of language; it is about origins and motives of myth-making. This is a novel of ideas (often strange ideas) that is sustained throughout by brilliant writing."— London Sunday Times "Far from being an escapist fantasy, Entering Fire takes on some of the biggest issues of the 20th century … For sheer power, inventiveness and verbal density, [it] is the best read I've come across for a long time."— The Observer "A drastically beautiful comic writer who stitches sentences together as if Proust had gone into partnership with Lenny Bruce."— City Limits " … imaginative and unbridled fantasy."— Le Monde " … an imagination and a style as captivating as it is devastating."— Lire "Unlike anything you've ever read before."— L'Express Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans.

"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind." Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas who, as a result of witnessing his mother's murder, falls into a decades-long coma. Awakened in a seaport town in France, he reconstructs his past through story-telling and myth, resulting in an astonishing exploration of memory and imagination. "Ducornet has no time for realism, preferring instead an incredibly pungent, heady and violent brew of words, packed with every maritime image imaginable, in which each sensation seems to be multiplied threefold and each character is ten times larger than life." (London Review of Books 3-26-92) "A book saturated with seawater and myth, a novel rippling with the underwater life of the unconscious, of the bawdy, the drunk and the uninitiated." (Harvard Review 6-92) "A remarkable feat of the imagination." (Booklist 1-15-92, starred review) "Highly recommended." (Library Journal 5-1-92) "[The Fountains of Neptune] bristles with suggested knowledge, with seductions toward symbolic readings. The page is redolent with sensual detail. It is its own kind of dream." (The Denver Post 2-9-92)

Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertilizer, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues will plot a bloody revenge. The fourth element in a tetralogy of novels - Earth (The Stain), Fire (Entering Fire), Water (The Fountains of Neptune) and Air - The Jade Cabinet is both a riveting novel and a reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language and power. Following the novel is an afterword, "Waking to Eden, " in which Ducornet reflects on the sources for her writing and on the quartet of novels completed by The Jade Cabinet.