Activity

The Story of the Lost Child is no manifesto. Who would want it to be? It is the story that an imposter might write, knowing herself to be one. An upstart’s novel, of bad mothers and bad feminists, bad politicos, of the kind of self-regard necessary to close oneself off in a room of one’s own and …

When the four of us began this whole enterprise, we met in person to talk about our projections and anxieties about writing together. Over pasta and wine, we worried about the idea of reading books together, long-term: What if we all came up with the same ideas? How would we distinguish our voices …

[...] Lila is the most clearly defined character at various points, yet she is also the most willing to embrace phase changes and transformations, at once the most and least solid of forms. Thus, both her magical changeability and her lifelong nightmare of slowly dissolving margins—perhaps migraine…

Solidarity to Lenu is both a dream and a nightmare; she wants to join in, but she is too afraid to relinquish her unique self to give in to the triumphal we that Jill highlighted in Balestrini. To her, that “we” is irreconcilable with the solitude of independent being or, more specifically, the d…

we might think of Lila's notebook as an irrepressible paean to what Bahktin once called "novelness" -- a keen sense of language as dialogic, alive, and ever-shifting; revolutionary even.