'There is, of course, no mandate that Rooney populate the landscape of her fiction with fat bodies as some kind of feint toward inclusion. But consider a reversal: if another writer, even one of Rooney’s stature, populated her novels with a similar number of fat characters, that stylistic choice would be interrogated in a way that Rooney’s is not.'
Emma Specter puts Sally Rooney's #fiction on the scales.
More #congratulations – this time to Patrick Cash, who has won the 2024 Creative Future Writers’ Award for #fiction with his forthcoming #novel Kai, 'a queer love story exploring identity, vulnerability and prejudice, as a student forms a relationship with his deaf drug dealer and uncovers unexpected tenderness beneath his tough exterior'.
'But if my novel displayed none of the usual commercial trappings—not even a bar code, because I had no intention of selling it—how then would I reach readers?'
Philip Graham turns self-publisher and distributes his latest novel by hand across the US: