The American novelist, whose latest work is a fake biography of an avant-garde artist, on growing up in Mississippi and why her fiction has ‘never actively involved cellphones or the internet’Catherine Lacey, 37, is the author of three previous novels, including The Answers, currently being adapted for television by Darren Aronofsky, and Pew (2020), about a nameless amnesiac of ambiguous race and gender. Her new novel, Biography of X, set in a parallel America, follows a widow untangling the life story of her wife, an avant-garde artist known as X. The New York Times has called it “sprawling and ambitious… strange and dystopian”. Lacey, one of Granta’s best young American novelists in 2017, was speaking from her home in Brooklyn.Which part of the book came first: the alternate history or the fake biography?I liked the idea of writing a fake biography and the biographies I like best are usually written by someone with some kind of compromised perspective. I thought the worst person to write a biography would be a surviving spouse with a bit of a grudge, but I didn’t want to get into the heterosexual dynamics of a man writing about a woman or a woman writing about a man; it had to be two women. At the same time, I wanted the novel to be set in the mid-20th century but I wasn’t interested in writing about the actual struggles a prominent lesbian couple would have gone through in that time. So my alternate history grew out of that problem. I thought, if I have an America... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-04-01 17:00:01 UTC ]
Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Fri, 28/10/2011 - 14:49 The Literature Prize is to be awarded in the spring of each year, with founder Andrew Kidd saying it will take place for the first time in 2012 if the necessary funding is secured by the end of this year. Kidd said the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-10-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Robert Stokes Publication Date: Wed, 05/10/2011 - 15:18 Liber, the 29th International Book Fair for the Spanish speaking world, starts today [5th October] in Madrid and takes place against the backdrop of the launch of Amazon.es, which publishers hope will lead to greater interest... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-10-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 24/03/2011 - 15:52 Setting books within the wider cultural scene and building collaborations are set to be key themes at this year's Book Industry Conference, as organisers revealed the event programme. BIC 2011, which takes place between... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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