Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL

Mona Awad

A darkly disturbing, edgy, and wholly original collection that will resonate with readers.

13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL focuses on the metamorphosis of Elizabeth March as she moves from fat adolescence to the equally desperate terrain of an ex-fat adulthood. The reader follows Elizabeth (aka Lizzie/Beth/Bettie/Elle/Bess/Liz) from the sideshow-esque sex life of her youth through a dysfunctional marriage to an isolated, perpetually frustrated existence in a gated community of glass. Told from the points-of-view of the ever evolving Elizabeth and several of her lovers, these stories explore how this struggle shapes her complex and often barbed relationships with friends, family, paramours and, most importantly, herself.

This darkly comic linked collection resonates widely—the brutal angst of being a teenager, feeling powerless in one’s own body, the deep ache of an unfulfilled life. Written in the vein of Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan, Awad has delivered a collection as caustically funny as it is heartbreaking.

Awad’s fiction (including many of the stories in this collection) has been published in McSweeney’s, The Walrus, Joyland, Post Road and St. Petersburg Review, among other journals. She has completed an MA in English literature from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in Fiction from Brown University where she was awarded the Feldman and John Hawkes prizes for her short fiction. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and English literature at the University of Denver.

Available products
Book Published 2016-02-23 by Penguin Paperback Original
Book Published 2016-02-23 by Penguin Paperback Original

Comments

A painfully raw—and bitingly funny—debut . . . It’s too simple to say that this is a novel ‘about’ body image and self-hatred and the systemic oppression of women (though that wouldn’t be totally wrong); in Lizzie, Awad has created a character too vivid, too complicated, and too fundamentally human to be reduced to a single moral. Lizzie’s particular sadness is unsettlingly sharp: she gets under your skin, and she stays there. Beautifully constructed; a devastating novel but also a deeply empathetic one.

Mona Awad’s startling 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL is a scathing, heartbreaking and wickedly funny story cycle that transcends all mainstream critiques of body image obsession with relentless honesty and artistry. You will re-read these razor sharp stories like you re-play your favorite songs.

This book sparkles with wit and at the same time comes across as so transparent and genuine—Awad knows how to talk about the raw struggles of female friendships, sex, contact, humanness, and her voice is a wry celebration of all of this at once.

Italian (Bompiani), Spanish (Kailas), Hungarian (Athenaeum Kiadó)

13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL is a hilarious and cutting collection. These stories have a gift for turning the everyday strange and luminous, for finding bright sparks of humor in the deepest dark. Mona Awad is a strikingly original and strikingly talented new voice.

Remarkable stories, committed to the most honest and painful portrayal and comprehension of what it means to be human, with all its flaws and joys.

In this dark, honest debut, Awad sharply observes—everywhere from online chat rooms to office break rooms—the struggles of growing up, growing out, and trying to slim down, at any cost.

It seems that Mona Awad can describe the imperfect nature of any love perfectly: whether it’s love between friends, between mother and daughter, husband and wife, woman and food. With sharp insight and sly humor, she makes you feel like you never understood the obsessive half-life of a food addict before. Not a word is wasted, and yet the book is bursting with richness and insight and observation. Each story works beautifully as a stand-alone piece and together they make a luminous whole, like a perfect string of pearls.

Touching . . . Behind the title of Awad’s sharp first book, a unique novel in 13 vignettes, is brazen-voiced Lizzie, who longs for, tests, and prods the deep center of the cultural promise that thinness, no matter how one achieves it, is the prerequisite for happiness.