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 ]
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The Pulitzer prize-winning author discusses her follow up to A Visit from the Goon Squad and how imagining a new technology set her writing freeWhen Jennifer Egan bought her house in Brooklyn 20 years ago, it had been on the market for eight months. The owners were an elderly couple, and the... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2022-04-16 08:00:03 UTC ]
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Her essay collection was removed from contention in the category of best lesbian memoir after she went on Twitter to defend a forthcoming Sandra Newman novel from charges that it was transphobic. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-03-22 01:34:52 UTC ]
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Essay Para on Lake Baikal in southern Siberia / Photo courtesy of the author Editorial note: “Siberian Romance,” a suite of Para’s poems, accompanies this introductory essay. Born in 1956, Jean-Baptiste Para is a poet, art critic, essayist,... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2022-03-08 19:30:36 UTC ]
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Book Reviews Photo by Chris Wood / Flickr Houston’s Second Poet Laureate (2015–2017) and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 2019, Robin Davidson is the author of three books of poetry: Kneeling in the Dojo (2013), City That Ripens... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2022-02-22 21:17:17 UTC ]
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Book Reviews Jean Giono at his home, Le Paraïs, in Manosque, France, 1942 / Photo by André Zucca / Courtesy Les Amis de Jean Giono Written late in life, “Le Haut Pays” and “Camargue”—once again paired in the Archipelago Books edition of... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2022-01-11 21:02:53 UTC ]
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Candida Lacey, former publishing director at Myriad Editions, is joining the newly announced Footnote Press as consulting editor. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-12-01 03:21:21 UTC ]
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“Our Journey Together" promises to capture “the greatness" of the Trump White House, but critics aren't convinced. Continue reading at HuffPost
[ HuffPost | 2021-11-20 12:07:31 UTC ]
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Guardian sports writer whose wit and talent redefined what a football column could beIt is not customary to look forward to Monday mornings but, in the heyday of the Guardian’s print sales in the late 1970s and 80s, many readers relished Monday’s paper more than anything else.On a features page... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-11-19 17:41:00 UTC ]
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Debut author Jesse Sutanto has won the CWIP Prize for Published Comic Novel, for her "deliciously frantic comedy caper" Dial A for Aunties (HarperCollins), with Dolly Alderton coming runner-up. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-11-08 09:52:15 UTC ]
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'My mother didn’t want us to live wars,' said Canada's Catherine Mavrikakis in a conversation at Frankfurter Buchmesse. The post Canadian Author Catherine Mavrikakis at Frankfurt: ‘Serious Thinking’ appeared first on Publishing Perspectives. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2021-10-28 16:58:14 UTC ]
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The main measurement companies, Nielsen and Comscore, say they're trying to update and change metrics, but buyers remain frustrated by the lack of progress. The post A ‘constant merry-go-round’: Nielsen and Comscore say the right things, but aren’t progressing fast enough for media buyers... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2021-09-30 19:04:53 UTC ]
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Twitter acquired newsletter publishing platform Revue in January, allowing it to continue to run as a stand-alone service, and the two companies began testing a way to integrate their respective platforms Thursday. Revue said in a tweet that all of its creators can begin enabling people to... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2021-08-19 22:40:00 UTC ]
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An account posing as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Road,” “No Country for Old Men” and “All the Pretty Horses” was mistakenly verified by Twitter. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-08-02 21:48:56 UTC ]
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With the help of a brilliant co-writer, a fully rounded picture may now emerge of the much-maligned royalNot since criminals were barred from profiting in this way can a publisher’s announcement of a memoir have united the British press in such disgust. Before that, even the gangster turned... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-07-25 07:00:45 UTC ]
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“Fox & I” is Catherine Raven’s memoir of her relationship with a bushy-tailed creature — no, not a dog. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-07-06 09:00:01 UTC ]
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People had questions about the Trump White House press secretary's upcoming book: "I assume that this is in the fiction section?" Continue reading at The Huffington Post
[ The Huffington Post | 2021-06-16 07:18:09 UTC ]
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‘The Disappearing Act’ is a twisty novel that capitalizes on Steadman’s Hollywood experience. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2021-06-06 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Book Reviews Ghetto Heroes Square in Kraków / Photo by annaspies / Flickr Piotr Florczyk’s From the Annals of Kraków (Lynx House Press, 2020) narrates the searing realization of an almost unnoticed absence, a regret urging us to learn about... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-04-28 20:24:52 UTC ]
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TV personality, cookbook author and former model posted final tweets to 13.7m followers before shutting down account Chrissy Teigen said goodbye to her 13.7 million Twitter followers on Wednesday night in a series of posts acknowledging the abuse and hatred on the platform.“Hey. For over 10... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-03-25 12:40:11 UTC ]
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Andrea Lee’s superb fiction often describes the collisions between people from different cultures. Her new novel widens the scope. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2021-03-23 13:00:00 UTC ]
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