GalleyCrush: Pink Mountain on Locust Island

by Staff
5.22.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Jamie Marina Lau’s Pink Mountain on Locust Island, forthcoming from Coffee House Press on September 8, 2020.

Perfect pitch: “Blending digital fever dream and hard-boiled noir in bursts of claustrophobic prose, Pink Mountain on Locust Island follows a teenager and her maybe-boyfriend into the seedy corners of the art world.”

First line: “On television a panther slicking its black limbs through paradise trees. Holy moly, look at this fur.”

Big blurb: “Visceral, restless, and edgy, while soulful and contemplative of exactly what Asian American diasporas are going through right now (“Stop looking at me with those contaminated eyes”), Pink Mountain on Locust Island will grab you with its originality and vivid imagery, while reminding you to go back and read such classics as Dogeaters (Jessica Hagedorn) and Bone (Fae Myenne Ng) for the same sense of frenetic energy juxtaposed against the claustrophobia of class and tradition. I loved this book, read it in a day, could not put it down. Episodic, startling, young, this is a must-read. The language is indeed elastic, and lovely.” —Chaya Bhuvaneswar

Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 248 pages. 

Author bio: Jamie Marina Lau is a twenty-three-year-old multidisciplinary writer and artist. Her debut novel, Pink Mountain on Locust Island, won the 2018 Melbourne Prize Readings Residency Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize, the 2019 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and the Australia Literature Society Gold Medal. Her writing can also be found in various publications. She is currently in the process of writing her second novel, Gunk Baby; working on various projects; and producing music.

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