Francine
a novella by
Joe Taylor
ISBN: 978-1-964277-56-1
96 pages, $14.95 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: January 2026
An Advance Sale Discount price of $8.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
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Joe Taylor has several story collections and novels, most recently, Don’t Be Lonely, Lone Ranger, from Nat1 Publishing. Others include: Persephone’s Escalator (Sley House), Eric and the Anti-Tankers (Nat1 Publishing), Pineapple (Sagging Meniscus) The Theoretics of Love, (New South Books); Silent Bob (Nat 1); Ghostly Demarcations (Sagging Meniscus), Oldcat & Ms. Puss: A Book of Days for You and Me (Black Belt Books); Back to the Wine Jug (Sagging Meniscus) Highway 28, West (Sagging Meniscus). Paradise Muzzled, a novel-in-verse, is forthcoming from Sagging Meniscus Press. His Ph.D. in Creative Writing comes from Florida State; his Bachelor’s in (gasp) philosophy, from U of Kentucky. He’s directed Livingston Press at The University of West Alabama . . . forever.
In his latest novella, Joe Taylor serves up a time-travelling tale narrated by René Descartes’s automaton daughter, and within it there’s nary a dull thought or line to be found. Francine has a ringside seat to much of what humankind has been up to for centuries: the good, the bad, and the very ugly (France’s Terror, Los Alamos’s mushroom cloud, Salem’s witch trials, the U.S. Civil War, to name a few), but she also has some fun, marching with Victoria (“Vicki”) Woodhull, motorcycling with B.F. Skinner’s daughter, bedding Kurt Vonnegut and John Berryman (among scores of others), all the while questioning both the nature and experience of existence. (As Taylor advises: “It’s only confusing if you think on it.”) Despite Francine’s extraordinary parameters, she does suffer personal disappointments. Stalk the poetess though she might, Francine cannot finagle an audience with the Belle of Amherst; she misses out on a Charlie Chaplin meet-and-greet; the baker she happily marries dies, leaving her to live her 21 lives “again and again and again.” If you loved Woolf’s Orlando, you will adore Taylor’s Francine. ~Kat Meads, While Visiting Babette
Joe Taylor has brought Descartes’s famous automaton to new life to speak of time past and time to come. A parable that eerily reflects on our contemporary dilemma with the prospect of self-governing artificial intelligence, the titular character Francine speaks to us, coming alive to contemplate the centuries. She nurses soldiers with Walt Whitman, paces outside Emily Dickinson’s homestead, leaves a glove on Spinoza’s grave, and indulges herself through multiple fascinating lives. Sorrowing, visceral, witty, Taylor’s Francine is an unpredictable, ingenious, and bold novel contemplating a dizzying world of recurrences. ~Lee Upton, author of Wrongful
You’re about to meet the most intriguing character in recent American fiction. Francine is an automaton, living across centuries, meeting (and often sleeping with) some of history’s most fascinating people. But Francine is no machine, no robot, but a captivating woman who will take you places you never dreamed of going. Brilliant, a tad crazy. The best of both. ~ Robert Inman, author of Villages and Home Fires Burning.
FRANCINE
. . . My father invented the geometric spatial system that assigns ascending and descending numbers to coordinate lines on an axis of X and Y. Thank him, ladies, the next time your GPS extracts you from muddle. My father enabled, in good part, the birth of science. Thank him for miraculous penicillin and your handy-dandy microwave. To top these wonders, my father offered a clear and distinct proof for the non-existence of a vacuum because . . . well, because a vacuum would indicate a space entrapping Absolute Nothing, an illogical — and therefore impossible! — space, for such a space clearly and distinctly would be not only missing but thereby limiting that ever-present, ever-powerful, ever-just, ever-knowing, ever-caring, ever-encompassing, ever-loving, and ever-eternal creature that we nimbly refer to as . . . God.
Alas, alas, even Homer must nod. Ladies, for your household vacuum cleaner, your outdoor barometer, and your bedside thermometer, you must needs thank my father’s stripling rival, sweet Blaise Pascal.
But. My father was the first to utter the Cogito: I think; therefore, I am.
And I myself do, so I myself must. Think, that is; exist, that is . . .
. . . Exist again and again; again and again. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fritz to me and the beauteous Lou Salomé, conjectured a demon — much as did my father — though instead of conniving to trick us into seeing a non-existent world as Poppà’s demon reportedly would, Fritz’s demon would make our very life repeat over and over and over in an eternal return. Over and over, again and again. A computer loop, if you will.
Just so, my life, from Poppà’s tinkering onward . . .
. . . My name is Francine. My father does not believe in reincarnation (nor does he know of computer loops), but he shakes his head and tells me, while we are tossed in the hold of that dreadful ship, that I am the closest the world will ever witness of the former. “Yes, the absolute closest,” he says, his shoulder bumping against our cabin’s wall as the ship tosses in the building storm. “Whoever would have thought?”
Four years before this conversation, he had constructed me as an automaton, something of an experiment reflecting the rage taking Europe with flute-playing, harp-plucking mechanical men. No women? Ah, Poppà, you innovative feminist rascal you! His automaton was not just a fanciful experiment, but something, I suppose, created in oppressive sorrow, for Poppà had formed me in the likeness of his dead daughter Francine. In brief, he had made me, me.
“I cannot imagine,” he adds, still shaking his head as I perch on my closed trunk before him, blinking and breathing in the salt air of our sea cabin, “how what has happened, happened.”
“Pygmalion?” I venture, my mother’s smart mouth erupting.
His eyes widen. Please understand that for those previous years while he sadly toted me around in a trunk, I was surreptitiously reading his books. If Poppà were alive now in this twenty-first century, I might have offered to him, “Frankenstein? Lightning?” Or more to the point, “Turing? The Singularity?”
“Regardless,” Poppà continues as I smile coyly. “I will give you all the love that I missed giving her . . . giving you . . . her . . . you.” Poppà is understandably confused. I only smile, to hide the fact of my own confusion. “More.” He hesitates and then gives a tug to his thin black moustache as the ship rocks. “Love. Perhaps . . .”
He is no doubt pondering the possibility that his intense love and sorrow have brought on my existence, that a compassionate God has breathed life into me as He did Adam and Eve, or, acting in the guise of Aphrodite, as Aphrodite did Pygmalion’s statue Galatea. See my above comment on an ever-powerful, –present, -caring, -knowing, -et cetera God. Starships, wormhole travel, Jell-O lime-green aliens, and cherry-red ray guns — quite possibly all four will arrive in some distant future. But Aphrodite, the philosopher’s stone, and God — let’s stay real. Yet . . . yet there is more, René, to this world than your philosophy has ever dreamed. Wait. Should I not be chastising myself, instead? There is more, Francine . . .
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