Mailing List


Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Catherine Lacey is a writer who came to New York by way of Tupelo, Mississippi She is a New York Foundation of the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and a Granta New Voice Lacey broke from the peloton last year with her debut novel, Nobody is Ever Missing (Granta) Her work struck me immediately for its synthesis of two qualities of prose which often exclude one another: distinctive voice and rich imagery   Nobody is Ever Missing follows Elyria from a stable but stagnant marriage to the wide-open possibilities of New Zealand As Elyria hitchhikes through the countryside, with only a scrap of a plan, she turns and returns memories of a lost stepsister and an absent husband The more Elyria travels, the more she struggles with the impossibility of running from yourself, calling this feeling her ‘wildebeest’ All this roiling introspection might have been too much in another writer’s hands But Catherine Lacey invigorates self-examination with prose that is alive and electric It’s the bright bristling reality of Elly’s world that makes Nobody is Ever Missing so significant   The novel teems with metaphor and metonymy—images do the work in progressing our understanding of Elyria’s mind and her trajectory The body becomes strange in these pages: hands become a metonym for love; we consider the possibility of living with two hearts; teeth are alternatively tiny, glowing and bared; the brain is animate and other, sometimes roving and acquisitive, sometimes lying calm and still in the dark Imagery, line-by-line, keeps at bay the claustrophobia that typically accompanies an exploration of feelings or an anatomization of body The reading experience is akin to waking up behind someone else’s eyes and feeling like if you tell anyone about it, you’ll find psychiatrists medicating your future You kind of want to keep this book a secret But you also want to tell everyone you meet to experience Elly’s voice   Catherine and I first met this year when paired together for a blind interview between debut novelists We recently talked about writing and life at the bar of Roebling Tea Room in Brooklyn We continued the conversation electronically the next

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

READ NEXT

Interview

Issue No. 4

Interview with Ahdaf Soueif

Jacques Testard

Interview

Issue No. 4

In 1999, Ahdaf Soueif’s second novel, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, eventually losing out...

poetry

September 2012

Moscow - Petrozavodsk

Maxim Osipov

Anne Marie Jackson

poetry

September 2012

  Mark well, O Job, hold thy peace, and I will speak. Job 33:31     To deliver man...

fiction

September 2015

The Afternoon

Wolfgang Hilbig

TR. Isabel Fargo Cole

fiction

September 2015

Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival. With the word...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required