Entangled Objects

168 pages
August 17, 2020

Entangled Objects is a contemporary pilgrim’s progress, the story of three very different yet interconnected women. As the story advances, their overlapping lives reveal the mysterious entanglement of quantum behavior.

Hardcover ISBN 9781639820436 $27.00
Paperback ISBN 9781639820429 $15.00
eBook ISBN 9781639820443 $12.99
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Entangled Objects is a contemporary pilgrim’s progress, the story of three very different yet interconnected women. As the story advances, their overlapping lives reveal the mysterious entanglement of quantum behavior.

Fan is a struggling adjunct professor. When she and her husband move to Korea so he can investigate the cloning of human cells, she finds herself having an affair, even as her husband gets caught trying to publish falsified research.

Filomena is a maid who begins to steal clothing from the rooms of wealthy guests, dressing up and haunting the hotel where she works. As she questions her own sexuality, she becomes obsessed with televangelists and begins communicating anonymously with hotel guests through text messages, delivering reassurances and warnings.

Finally, there is Cate, a reality star who manages her own reality television career and that of her family. She orchestrates the alcoholic binges of her rock-star husband, edits the family’s daily footage, arranges re-shoots, and crafts her world as well as that of her mother and sisters.

As the characters’ lives converge, all three confront the question: when are we most ourselves, when we realize the selves we aspire to, or when we are unadorned? Their meeting will leave them all changed forever.

Entangled Objects navigates with uncanny sensitivity and roofless imagination the multiplicity of self. With compassion Paola Antonetta asks, who are we when alone, unobserved? What illusory versions of the self fuel our deepest longings and regrets? The frictive sparks these unreconciled selves emit in collusion and collision propel these narratives in surprising directions that allow for unexpected beauty.

Gina Ochsner, author of The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

Entangled Objects is a deeply ruminative, almost impressionistic work of art about three women who are entangled without touching, who share a metaphysical sense of time and place and meaning but whose physical worlds couldn’t be at greater odds. I was reminded by turns of Marilynne Robinson and Robert Stone, Virginia Woolf and Andrea Barrett too. But these lives, at once disparate and attuned to one another, and the frank and tender beauty with which they are rendered, are all Susanne Paola Antonetta.”

Bret Lott, Professor of English, The College of Charleston