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Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRYThe Paris ReviewThe Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

pages: 152

format: paperback original

isbn: 978-1-948980-23-4

publication date: 9/17/2024

My Lesbian Novel

Renee Gladman


buy this book
from our distributor NYRB

“Readers of Gladman’s previous work will recognize her brilliant thinking and penchant for challenging experiments, though this is her most accessible book yet. . . . It’s a knockout.” Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

The Millions “Most Anticipated” * PW “10 New Works of Queer Fiction” * Lit Hub “Most Anticipated” * Book Riot “20 Best New Queer Books” * Autostraddle “Most Anticipated Queer Books Fall 2024” * Write or Die Mag “35 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in September” * Electric Literature “The Best Books of the Fall, According to Indie Booksellers” * Vulture “The Best Books of 2024 (So Far)” * Vulture “The Best Must-Read Books of 2024″ * Lit Hub “Lit Hub’s 38 Favorite Books of 2024”

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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 formula and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.

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You can read a curated excerpt from My Lesbian Novel in the Summer 2024 issue of The Paris Review.

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“My Lesbian Novel is a brilliant fusion of improvisational narrative and aesthetic treatise. It’s fiction and not. It’s also a hoot. And even (eventually) hot—with charm, it swirls horniness with helplessly nerdy literariness.” Megan Milks, 4Columns

My Lesbian Novel is an acrobatic book, as brilliant as it is erotic. It’s hard to think of another writer who might pull this off.” Isle McElroy, Vulture, “The Best Books of 2024 (So Far)”

My Lesbian Novel represents an arresting, dialogic approach to the philosophy of lesbian and queer narration and a new triumph in Gladman’s ever-innovative body of work.” John Keene, National Book Award Winner for Punks

“A perfect introduction to all things Gladman, certain to hook a whole new swath of readers.” Drew Broussard, LitHub

“Gladman doesn’t simply deliver the lesbian novel you may expect from the title, though italicized flashes of a novel are found interspersed alongside the central dialogue between an interviewer and a character named Renee Gladman. The resulting book moves from intellectual ambition to bodily yearning, while exploring Gladman’s own compulsions to articulate thought in writing or to transcribe gesture in drawing.” John Vincler, Cultured

“An expansive, experimental, genre-bending new work from Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel explores art-making, queerness, philosophy, desire, and identity as an artist.” Autostraddle, “Most Anticipated Queer Books of Fall 2024”

My Lesbian Novel is philosophical and funny and optimistic and frustrated and needy because it desires a literature that doesn’t quite exist yet.” Maggie Lange, Purse Books

My Lesbian Novel is a genre-bending celebration of lesbian desire that offers an innovative shape for queer romance, a craft lecture spooning its own novel. Gladman shows that true romance emerges through dialogue, shaped between partners, no matter if they are lovers or writers wrestling with love.” Erin Vachon, The Rumpus

My Lesbian Novel takes on a new genre for Gladman, the Happily Ever After, a romance in which you know that the lovers will find their way. This requires Gladman to set up two couples: as she figures out how to get June and Thena into each other’s arms, she also arranges a marriage between romance and literary fiction. . . . Gladman has always been comfortable with self-referentiality, but My Lesbian Novel is her most explicit account yet of the creative act.” Rainer Diana Hamilton, Frieze

“I’ll follow Renee Gladman anywhere. Her form-breaking books are otherworldly in their glories and when I found out she was writing a romance novel (well, sort of), I decided I didn’t need to know a single thing more and immediately ordered it. Of course, it is far stranger and trickier than that—but it’s also Renee Gladman tackling the hot genre!! Let’s go!!” Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated”

My Lesbian Novel is so small, so deceptively simple, that it’s surprising how nourishing it feels. Gladman has mastered the literary pleasures of slowness and withholding, of leaving space for possibility and growth. . . . The genre of her lesbian novel, Gladman is constantly reminding us, is romance — a love story about mutual discovery and mutual change. Beneath the deadpan humor is a philosophical commitment: The most important thing about falling in love with women is women.” Lois Beckett, Lux

“Gladman’s precise and incisive writing makes me feel like I’m right alongside her investigating the limits of literature. It’s an adventure into the avant-garde. Also, I will read anything that comes from Dorothy!” Laura Hughes (co-owner, Basket Books & Art), Publishers Weekly 

My Lesbian Novel refuses to settle the question of the visible: life ends, but writing never really does, and Gladman has followed a sentence that moves us around corners as we read it.” charles theonia, BOMB “Editor’s Choice”

“The book feels epic despite its slim size, and what is distinctly marvelous and monumental and exceptional about it is that it is equally successful as a metatext and formally inventive work as it is as a swoon-worthy, stomach butterflies producing work of romance fiction.” Meghana Kandlur, Electric Literature

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

“No one writes prose like Renee Gladman.” Lucy Corin

“Like watching open heart surgery on the very idea of the novel, Gladman’s latest brilliant book is a mind bending, mind stretching, mind altering excavation of making meaning with the written word. But it is also a story about desire, about identity, and about how complicated it can be to get what you want.” Josh Cook, Porter Square Books, “Staff Pick”

 

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Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRYThe Paris ReviewThe Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

pages: 152

format: paperback original

isbn: 978-1-948980-23-4

publication date: 9/17/2024

 

cover art:
Art on cover © Laylah Ali
Sky, 2014, gouache and acrylic on board
Used by kind permission of the artist

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis.  The precision with which Ali creates her small, figurative, gouache paintings on paper is such that it takes her many months to complete a single work. Ali’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous public institutions, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; among many others. Learn more about her at her website.