Good afternoon everyone,

I’ll say much more about this in my books of the year, but while I was on holiday I read Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and it was the best novel I have read for the first time in the last decade. It’s a very long stream of consciousness novel, so here is a Fem Fri of exactly those.

Let’s start with an interview with Lucy Ellmann:

both the mountain lion and the human narrator are embattled mothers, at the mercy of a society which awards them little status. If you were free, brave, and alone, what kind of a mother would you make? A great one. That’s what the lioness is.

https://scroll.in/article/946280/i-have-no-contempt-for-the-ordinary-lucy-ellmann-author-of-a-430000-word-1034-page-novel

I feel a bit overfaced at the thought of reading Dorothy Richardson’s cycle of 13 (thirteen!!!) stream of consciousness novels, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned this year it’s that one should just go ahead and read the long stream of consciousness novels:

It was the first novel to be labelled “stream of consciousness”, in a review by May Sinclair – a phrase that had been popular with psychologists for some time but hadn’t yet been applied to literature. Richardson hated the phrase, saying that “amongst the company of useful labels devised to meet the exigencies of literary criticism it stands alone, isolated by its perfect imbecility”. Unfortunately for Richardson, however, the phrase stuck. The stream of consciousness novel acquired genre status.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/may/15/dorothy-m-richardson-deserves-recognition-finally-receiving

Love,

Alex.