The Time of the Novel
The novelist will be joined by poet Wendy Xu
What is “fiction” and how does one “enter” into it? Composed in the tense of Literature, The Time of the Novel is about detours, psychic swerves, and surprising encounters with the Real as it converges with the written.
A disaffected young woman seeking self-estrangement and withdrawal from the world decides to quit her day job as a bookseller to live out, or live in, an experiment: to become a full-time narrator. She moves through sentences, afternoons, a rented apartment, an artist’s studio, a party, the post office with the flowering focus of a realist novel, transposing physical and social life to the space of fiction. As she chronicles the process of becoming a subject in writing, the narrator confronts her fantasy of uninterrupted interiority—and its limits.
“Spellbinding. Reads like a thriller, thinks like a philosopher, and enchants like a poet of the first order. Reality is now permanently warped because this book exists.” —Paul Chan
Lara Mimosa Montes is an editor, teaching artist, and author, most recently of The Time of the Novel (Wendy’s Subway, 2025). She has published two books of poetry, THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020) and The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016). The recipient of artist residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, and Headlands Center for the Arts, her writing appears widely. She is a faculty member of the Creative Writing MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art and teaches in the XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement Master’s program at NYU.
Wendy Xu is the author of The Past (2021), and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. A critical text on poetics, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire, is forthcoming Oct 2025 in the Poets on Poetry Series. She is assistant professor of writing at The New School.
Buy your books at Ampersand and join the conversation!
This is an online event streamed via Zoom.
Choose the ticket price that’s right for you: Free, $5, $10, $15 or $20
