Seven novels about multiple timelines & blurred realities

Erin Kate Ryan is the author of Quantum Girl Theory.

Leaning against her basement wall are degrees from Boston University School of Law and the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Her fiction has been published in VQR, Glimmer Train, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She is a James Jones First Novel Fellow and a McKnight Artist Fellow. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she was an Alumni Fellow. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her partner and found family.

At Electric Lit Ryan tagged seven novels that "explore [the] idea of multi-layered reality, of the expanded moment, in radically different ways." One title on the list:

Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe

The multivalent storylines in Delayed Rays unfurl from an Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph of Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and Anna May Wong taken at a party in 1928 Berlin. Each woman’s path spirals outward and returns back to the making of the photograph, retrofitting the moment of the camera’s flash with 40, 60, 75 years of future events, desires, and loss.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue