Description
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition, Selected by Wayne Koestenbaum.
"Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang's A BESTIARY. This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments, but as it weaves itself into an even more impressive whole, my hat came off. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake."—Maggie Nelson
"A BESTIARY is a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness. It seems completely contemporary (by which I mean that it is unlike anything I've read and that it makes me want to change my own writerly procedures). With head-long, reckless, improvisatory gestures, Lily Hoang prompts us to rethink what literature today can dare to aspire to. Her intellectually magnanimous book's position on the threshold between recognizable 'literature' and some other vanguard form of performance/utterance made me feel happy and stimulated and dizzy (in a rapturous way) while I was reading it."—Wayne Koestenbaum
"The most perfect use of fragmentation, myth, language, fairytale, and terrible beauty that I have ever seen in my life. I'm swooning. My faith in what writing can be has been restored."—Lidia Yuknavitch
Author Bio
Lily Hoang's books include A BESTIARY (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016), THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION (Les Figues, 2010), and CHANGING (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008), recipient of a PEN Open Books Award. She has two novels forthcoming: Old Cat Lady and The Book of Martha and she co-edited the anthology THE FORCE OF WHAT'S POSSIBLE: WRITERS ON ACCESSIBILITY AND THE AVANT-GARDE (Nightboat Books, 2015). She teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she is Associate Department Head. She serves as Prose Editor at Puerto del Sol and Non-Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat.
Author City: LAS CRUCES, NM USA