Hawthorne Books

Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, Dora: A Headcase, out in Italy, molto bene!

A Declaration: Lidia Yuknavitch has done more for “the body as art form” than anyone in recent memory. Read Dora, and if you haven’t already, read The Chronology of Water.

To read the entire review, go to Persephone Magazine.

Yuknavitch’s protagonist, the 17-year-old Ida, is a modern reincarnation of Freud’s famous bisexual case study Dora, whom our most famous shrink deemed “hysterical.” Ida may be a bit “hysterical” too — but she’s taking back the term. She’s raunchy, irreverent, filled with the desire to strip naked in the middle of “Nordfucks” or shave her head, sidekicked by a beautiful gang of weirdos. “I want to create new girl myths,” Yuknavitch said of the book. We think everyone...Forward

The RumpusWhat do you look for in a memoir? What stands out to you as “good?”

Lidia YuknavitchI look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don’t ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. See what I mean? I also thought of The Lover by Marguerite Duras as a memoir. Most of Carole Maso’s books and Kathy...Forward

Simply stated: She is important. Read. Her. Now.—Margaret Elysia Garcia

To read the entire post go to The Pumas Weekly.

KaitWhat does sex do for a story?

Lidia I come from such a weird angle because I think desire and sexuality are in language. My job is to find the writing path that will surface that idea. In a way, I’m a little bit against the inserted sex scene because I don’t think that it happens in our bodies and real life, so why should we do that in our writing? The Americanized, market-driven sex scene dislocates sex from our real experience. I teach a workshop on sex, death, and memoir. The first...Forward

J.A. Tyler, at The Rumpus reviews Lidia Yuknavitch’s debut novel, Dora: A Headcase.

“Like Salinger’s Holden and Chbosky’s Charlie and de la Pena’s Sticky Boy and Green / Levithan’s Will Graysons, Yuknavitch has written a frightfully insightful voice of youth, mimicking the language of our texters and status-updaters but with an angst and propensity for violence so explosive it puts Holden to shame.”

To read the entire review, go to The Rumpus.

Lidia Yuknavitch and Monica Drake with k.d. lang last night at the John Wesley Harding’s Cabinet of Wonders: A Benefit for the Children’s Cancer Association’s My Music Rx.  Also participating was Carrie Brownstein, Peter Buck, Sallie Ford, Ben Gibbard, k.d. lang, Storm Large, Scott McCaughey, Colin Meloy, Eugene Mirman, and Laura Veirs.

Editor’s Note: When I asked Rumpus fave, Lidia Yuknavitch, to interview the quiet-yet-provocative force that is Kat Meads, I knew something interesting would result. Meads, long drawn to the overlap between history and fiction and to exploring the private side of political movements, has recently released a slyly intelligent, subversive novel, For You, Madam Lenin, focusing on Vladimir Lenin’s wife, Nadya Krupskaya, as well as other women drawn in to his turbulent orbit, including his...Forward

Congratulations, Lidia Yuknavitch for Dora: A Headcase making the Satff Top Five. Kim H said,

Yuknavitch is such a literary badass.

And Doug C says,

Thank you, Lidia Yuknavitch, for the meatiest, most-fun, most-challenging-to-my-sense-of-how-far-you-can-push-things book of the year.

Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen, includes Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase in her Best of the Small Press 2012.

From DailyCandy:

Lidia Yuknavitch’s contemporary retelling of Freud’s famous Dora case study substitutes Dora for a punk, tech-savvy Seattle teen who runs with a posse of artists that includes a gay boy, a lesbian, and a straight girl. The voice is equal parts humor and anger and made us feel 17 again.

From Flavorwire:

17-year-old Ida is a modern reincarnation of Freud’s famous bisexual case study Dora, whom our most famous shrink deemed “hysterical.” Ida may be a bit “hysterical” too — but she’s so many more things: raunchy, irreverent, filled with the desire to strip naked in the middle of “Nordfucks” or shave her head, sidekicked by a beautiful gang of weirdos. Plus, she’s recording everything in her punked-out Dora the Explorer purse. “I want to create new girl...Forward