'The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam' and 'The Endless Week' — innovative and intimate new books from St. Louis–based feminist publisher, Dorothy
| A longlist nominee for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction and a debut novel from the 2023 winner of the Prix Goncourt for poetry In her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein invented a new literary form by narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, blurring the lines between portrait and self-portrait. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein’s project to tell a different story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration.
At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao’s life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, 9/11, and Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender. Photo credit: H. Lan Thao Lam Lin’s ingenious and absorbingly tender book meditates on dyadic identity while honoring the miracle and the mundaneness of bonded life.
—Megan Milks, 4Columns Lyrical prose, palpable love, and formal audacity coalesce to make this a must-read.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Laura Vazquez
Translated from the French by Alex Niemi Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by Vazquez, winner of the 2023 Prix Goncourt for poetry and one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time. Laura Vazquez photo credit: Roberto Frankenberg Are the kids ok? Are the elders? Are the gods? Are the dead? In this mesmeric novel, loneliness and the (online) community, language and image, the immediate and the mediated, violence and care construct a tender, precarious microzone called intimacy. A lumbar puncture of a book, a golden strain.
—Joyelle McSweeney
Vazquez has created a unique and enduring novel. Something hard and real and tangible glitters amid the vapour of text and image she describes.
—Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review
Titles from Dorothy, a publishing project are available from New York Review Books. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, and founded in 2010, Dorothy publishes two books per year of innovative fiction, near-fiction, and literary criticism mostly by women. |
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