Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

WHAT PURPOSE DID I SERVE IN YOUR LIFE

Marie Calloway

Marie Calloway emerged in 2011 as a controversial, compelling young talent whose work drove intense and polarized discussion from its first appearance. Her debut work of fiction, what purpose did i serve in your life, examines the nature of sex and the possibility of real connection in the face of degradation and blankness.

Its interlocking stories follow a chronological arc from innocence to sexual experience, taking in the humiliations of one night stands with male strangers, the perils of sex work, and the caustic reception that greets a woman working and writing in public. It is a brave and pitiless examination of yearning in an era of hyper-exposure and a riveting account of the moments of transcendence seized from an otherwise blank world.

Available products
Book Published 2013-06-01 by Tryant Books

Comments

How a 23-year-old author shattered taboos surrounding sexuality in print -- and freaked out the critics Read more...

Marie Calloway Pushes The Boundaries Of What's Printable... Read more...

Well, What Purpose DO You Serve? Musto Talks to Marie Calloway. Read more...

The experience of reading what purpose did i serve in your life, which rides the line between performed and genuine vapidity and malign naiveté so closely that the distinction between them blurs, is by turns dull, titillating, appalling, riveting, and as head-spinning, in Hoberman’s phrase, as “a hall of mirrors in which Girl Power and female powerlessness are endlessly reflected.” It is not, in other words, easy to turn away from. Easier, perhaps, to catch a shattered glance of oneself.

...What is so refreshing about what purpose did i serve in your life is what is most hidden from its stories of abject degradation: Its purity... Read more...

Dutch: Atlas-Contact

What purpose did i serve in your life is such a unique document that I have no idea if she could ever repeat its success. But she has gone all the way. She has not chickened out. She wrote the story she was given down to the bone. That's what real artists do. It's maybe the most surprising triumph to emerge from the literature of disaffection: What purpose did i serve in your life is the real thing.

I have never read a book like this before. It’s painful, shocking, and compellingly written, composed with great sensitivity to which details should be revealed and which must stay concealed. Its genre-muddle and formal complexity make for a completely unforgettable, profoundly contemporary, and plainly great work of courage and art. Here’s a terrifying proposal: could this be The Great American Novel for the twilight of “Great" America?

what purpose did i serve in your life is moving, unprecedented, threatening, and surreal—the exciting, rare work of someone with nothing to lose. It's intuitive and overpowering, concise and extreme. And, like a plant or a comet, it doesn't pause to explain what it's doing, defend or rationalize its existence, or attempt to obscure or distort its intentions. If you're attentive toward it—and earnest and open-minded and non-malicious in your attention—you will likely question and examine what you yourself are doing and why, and how to change.

Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure.

Marie Calloway breaks that chain of regulation by displaying her body like a beggar displays her wounds, by asserting awkwardness and shame (for the body, for ambition).

Q&A with Marie Calloway: Why does she write about sex? Read more...

Men Respond to Marie - The titillating, frustrating debut by online lit’s enfant terrible. Read more...