My Lesbian Novel

(Paperback)

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The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance-"though aspects of the formula drive me crazy . . . people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are"-a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time. The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman's ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex. The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance-"though aspects of the formula drive me crazy . . . people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are"-a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.

Reviews

Gladman is, easily, one of the most intriguing and important writers of our time. Amina Cain

My Lesbian Novel represents an arresting, dialogic approach to the philosophy of lesbian and queer narration and a new triumph in Gladmans ever-innovative body of work. John Keene

No one writes prose like Renee Gladman. Lucy Corin

Reading Gladman, I sometimes feel Im watching a mastermind manipulate a Rubiks Cube, except the goal isnt to solve it but to present every possible arrangement. Ben Purkert, The Rumpus

Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamershe writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes. Eileen Myles

Gladman pushes up against the boundaries of narrative while nestling comfortably within it. Her prose is vivid, meandering, and acute. Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, all published by Dorothy-Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and was a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.