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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Pandemic Dispatches Images courtesy of Italo Lanfredini / italolanfredini.it Invitations The outside brick wall of La Silenziosa, Italo Lanfredini’s house-studio-open-air-museum near Commessaggio, Italy, features a Wall of Song (Muro del canto). Amidst... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-03-17 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Author Brené Brown offered the keynote talk on the final day of the ABA's Winter Institute and urged booksellers to improve their communication skills and not to anticipate a return to normalcy, but to prepare for a future of constant disruption. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2021-02-22 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. If you're reading this online or in a forwarded email, here's the link to sign up for our Wake-Up Call newsletters. 'Party in the U.S.A. ' Good morning! Remember last week when we reported... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2021-01-26 11:00:00 UTC ]
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At the London Review of Books, Colin Burrow reflects on how Ursula K. Le Guin‘s narrative prowess flourished within the constraints of science fiction and children’s literature. “Fiction needs the unruly energies of indeterminacy,” Burrow writes, “of being partly inside the mind of the reader,... Continue reading at The Millions
[ The Millions | 2021-01-20 21:30:12 UTC ]
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She also wrote a memoir about her parents, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2021-01-15 14:46:04 UTC ]
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Indie bookshops in Tiers 2 and 3—which, unlike Tier 4 shops, can still open their doors to customers—have reported a change in customer behaviour this week, with reduced footfall since the government's warnings and further restrictions at the weekend. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-12-23 07:59:52 UTC ]
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As this week’s FutureBook20 conference has shown, this is a year where change is at the top of the agenda for the publishing industry. And when it comes to changing the sort of books that get published and the sort of authors whose voices are heard, broadening the acquisition process is crucial. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-20 22:39:15 UTC ]
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Tech firms, newly sensitive to fake news, stopped the story circulating. Now the global media giant has roared in outrageMedia organisations shouldn’t publish allegations unless they believe them to be true, after making appropriate checks. This is a normally uncontroversial principle of... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-10-21 16:30:01 UTC ]
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Of mixed Filipino, Chinese, Spanish and Indian descent, and identifying as queer, Catherine Hernandez’s new novel, Crosshairs, imagines a dystopian near-future Canada where an oppressive regime is rounding up those deemed “Other”—people of colour, the disabled and members of the LGBTQ+... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-10-14 02:09:59 UTC ]
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Daniel Yergin is behind the curve on the activism, engineering and climate science reshaping the energy world, environmentalist Bill McKibben contends. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-09-25 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Clerkenwell Films has optioned the TV rights for Rewind (Corvus, 2020) by Irish writer Catherine Ryan Howard. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-07-13 22:43:28 UTC ]
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“Becoming Duchess Goldblatt” blends a fictional character’s signature wit with an author’s real grief. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-07-08 15:28:33 UTC ]
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“Becoming Duchess Goldblatt” is a memoir by the writer behind a beloved fictional character whose fans include Lyle Lovett and Celeste Ng. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-07-01 14:20:37 UTC ]
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Will browsing be allowed, or will we have to judge a book by its cover? With Waterstones and some indie shops set to open on 15 June, Alison Flood finds out what the plan isMelissa Davies had planned to fulfil a lifelong dream and open her independent bookshop, Pigeon Books, in Southsea, at the... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-06-12 06:00:14 UTC ]
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On Saturday, Denver’s beloved independent bookstore Tattered Cover released a statement “about recent events,” asserting their support for Black Lives Matter, but also defending their silence and explaining that to align the bookstore with any “public debate” is a “slippery slope.” Bookstore... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-06-08 13:56:08 UTC ]
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Each year around this time, digital publishers and tech platforms announce their content plans for the year ahead. These annual upfront and NewFronts pitches are a bid to partner with agencies and advertisers to reassemble audiences across the ever-changing video landscape. That process will... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2020-05-28 01:23:59 UTC ]
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“The Poster,” edited by Gill Saunders and Margaret Timmers of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, is a beautiful survey of the medium. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-05-21 14:34:13 UTC ]
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With its cultlike fixation on control, it’s clear from the outset that something is deeply wrong with Catherine House. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-05-15 13:00:00 UTC ]
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As the country shelters in place during the COVID-19 crisis, the Los Angeles Times unveiled the winners of its 40th Annual Book Prizes on Twitter this morning, among them Marlon James, Ilya Kaminsky, and Ben Lerner. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-04-17 04:00:00 UTC ]
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“It’s been a reminder that people are inherently good,” the best-selling author said. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-04-03 20:34:59 UTC ]
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