Lidia Yuknavitch’s dreamy new novel imagines a girl swimming through the country’s grim past and future
her latest novel, “Thrust,” relies on time travel and characters from society’s margins to explore the idea that “it might be possible to change the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.”
Lidia Yuknavitch Mines the Lives of People on the 'Verge'
“The characters in Verge, her new collection of short stories, are misfits too: rejects and refugees and runaways and an addict turned yuppie, all of whom are desperate to make sense of the alienation that separates them from their families, from society or from their own bodies… There is a vein of the wisdom of the grotesque throughout; as one character reflects after harming herself, ‘this was all a little disgusting, the kind of story that would make the listener lean a little away from her.’ But the damaged beauty of these misfits keeps the reader leaning in.”
By JEFF VANDERMEER, 4/25/17
A Brilliant, Incendiary Joan of Arc Story for a Ravaged Earth
"Telling the truth with precision and rage and a visionary’s eye, using both realism and fabulism, is one way to break through the white noise of a consumerist culture that tries to commodify post-apocalyptic fiction, to render it safe. But in Yuknavitch’s work there’s no quick cauterizing of the wound, nothing to allow us to engage in escapism. The result is a rich, heady concoction, rippling with provocative ideas. There is nothing in “The Book of Joan” that is not a great gift to Yuknavitch’s readers, if only they are ready to receive it."
By Paul Di Filippo, 4/24/17
Lidia Yuknavitch blasts Joan of Arc into outer space
"Once the reader accepts the incongruities and phantasmagorical exaggerations of Yuknavitch’s damning nightmare, the book offers a wealth of pathos, with plenty of resonant excruciations and some disturbing meditations on humanity’s place in creation."
By Garth Greenwell, 8/25/2015
THE WILD, REMARKABLE SEX SCENES OF LIDIA YUKNAVITCH
"Yuknavitch’s sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art."
By Amy Wang, 4/15/17
In 'The Book of Joan,' Lidia Yuknavitch blends dystopia with a redefinition of hope
"The Book of Joan," publishing Tuesday, April 18, made numerous "most anticipated books of 2017" lists, and Yuknavitch does not disappoint with this mesmerizing, mind-expanding read."
The Book of Joan
"Perhaps even more astounding is Yuknavitch’s prescience: readers will be familiar with the figure of Jean de Men, a celebrity-turned–drone-wielding–dictator who first presided over the Wars on Earth and now lords over CIEL, having substituted “all gods, all ethics, and all science with the power of representation, a notion born on Earth, evolved through media and technology.”
By Jennifer Glaser, 7/31/15
Ms. Difficult
"It is this liberatory experimentation with voice that distinguishes The Small Backs of Children and places it squarely in the realm of the most accomplished experimental fiction."
Nicole Rudick, 7/10/15
"The new addition is Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children. I have never felt so wrung out by a novel and yet simultaneously invigorated. I mean all of this in recommendation: it’s a terrifically good novel and powerfully written, and it’s refreshing to be punched in the gut by a book now and then."
By Laura Collins-Hughes, 7/4/15
'The Small Backs Of Children' by Lidia Yuknavitch
The girl is an artist, and she paints with her own blood: waits for it to flow out of her and colors her canvases with red. Many necessities are in short supply in Lidia Yuknavitch’s furious and tender novel, “The Small Backs of Children” — peace, safety, protection from mortal pain — but blood is never one of them.
By Valerie Stivers-Isakova, 2/13/13
Review: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water — A Body Memoir Gone Viral
“'Viral' is a good meme for a memoir about the body, and seems appropriate for a small book published in 2011 that’s still breaking 50,000 on Amazon, and keeps popping up on blogs and social media feeds. Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water is the kind of book that people don’t just read, but become converted to."
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