Blurbs about my forthcoming novel PARABOLA, co-winner of the Chiasmus Press First Book Contest:
"Rarely does an author as fresh as Lily Hoang do so many things with such sophistication: a daring writer, an aesthetic high-wire walker who makes big issues her baton, balances the weight of literary and personal history-and all while wearing the future as her hat. In the midst of debates about where writing as an art form can go in this still nascent, post-everything new Millennium, Lily Hoang reveals one possibility: conceptually ambitious fiction woven from the lyrical language of longing. That is, Parabola is a novel of intersections--of Xs and Ys, of private and public paths. Coming to us from the crossroads of literature, Parabola also demonstrates how we don't have to choose between heart and head; anyone interested in traveling paths not-taken would do well to use this book as their compass." -Steve Tomasula
"In PARABOLA, Lily Hoang has created a new form of constraint writing: fractal fiction, a fragmented geometric shape subdivided in parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole, all of which are based on the Pythagorean belief in numerical magic, in unity in multiplicity. The result is a smart, ingenious, difficult, absurd, surprising, unnerving, liberating, mathematically precise, temporally crazed, impishly interactive formal rupture and rapture, a beehive of narrative nodes. Read this, and you will never see the novel in the same way again." -Lance Olsen, author of 10:01 and ANXIOUS PLEASURES
"A work of proportion, grace, tenderness, ferocity. The easy intelligence and genuine audacity of Lily Hoang's Parabola makes it a wonderful and disarming reading experience." -Carole Maso
"Lily Hoang’s Parabola deploys a calculus of composition that always already approaches the absolute of… Or I was going to say something like that, but this book exhausts the conceits of mathematics, physics, heavenly bodies, and the human heart. The story problems have all been proven; the figures figured. Parabola is a tour de form with force multiplied further. Elegant vision is the constant and ever-changing. And imaginary numbers are the least part of the imagination evident here, and everywhere, in this sublimely sublime book." -Michael Martone
Excerpts from CHANGING (forthcoming Winter 2008/09 from Fairy Tale Review Press):
Alice Blue Review
Jumps Journal.
Praise for CHANGING:
"A close, pure, astonished meditation on family and first love. If fairy tales, children’s stories, and the I Ching help shape this text, the pain of self-identity runs across it like a welt." -Stacey Levine
"Lily Hoang’s Changing is an impossible thing, a dream object, an accretion of volatile particulars and a game of fateful chance only temporarily bewitched to book form." -Joyelle McSweeney
You can love my presses:
Chiasmus Press
Fairy Tale Review Press
Les Figues Press.
Check out my new blog for a class I'm teaching in the spring:
Avant Women Writers Blog.
