“Marked by Corin’s limber voice, this brims with genuine depth and humor... Delightfully askew, Corin’s work offers a memorable exploration of how a loved one’s mental illness can impact an individual’s outlook.”
“Whenever the dull carapace of cliché seems to swallow the world, I reach for Lucy Corin’s books and the violent magic of her storytelling. Here is a writer light years ahead of her time returning to explore the recent past of our ongoing American crises. The Swank Hotel is premonitory and grief-stricken and somehow gregarious in its lonesomeness, so generous in its weird humor and waterfalling surprises. In her capacious vision, the ‘rattlesnakes of madness’ twine through a world of starter homes and desktop screensavers, crushing debt and missing sisters, a cruel, bewildering America where the runestones of love and home can still, miraculously, make sense of us.”
“Corin creates a series of dreamscapes in which the apocalypse becomes a set piece for melancholy, humorous, beautiful, and lonely ruminations.”
“Pure sleight of hand. How is it done? Come closer, I’ll tell you. She closes her eyes and watches the movies playing 24-7 inside the lids.”
“Edgy and erotic. Interestingly psychotic.”
Lucy Corin is a fiction writer. Her most recent book is the novel The Swank Hotel (Graywolf Press, 2021), which Publisher’s Weekly praised as “delightfully askew.” She is the author of two short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney's Books, 2013), which the San Francisco Chronicle called “a delightful, endlessly inventive read,” The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books, 2007), and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2 in 2004). Her work has appeared in journals including American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and Tin House Magazine, and in anthologies such as New American Stories (Vintage Contemporaries). She was an American Academy of Arts and Letters John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2012-13 and won a 2016 Fellowship in Literature from the NEA.
Asked about how she came to write One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, Corin responded, “I was driving across the country and I decided to take secondary roads and byways instead of [Interstate] 80. When you’re spending that much time by yourself in your car looking at landscapes, it’s desolate. Most of the other people around you are invisible in their own cars. You’re driving past houses where maybe once in a while somebody is out, but that’s about it. So I was interested in that aesthetic and I decided I wanted to write an apocalyptic narrative, but the more I thought of it, it seemed bizarre and untenable to me to pick one, so I just didn’t.”
A graduate of Duke and the MFA program at Brown, Corin is on the faculty of the MFA program at UC Davis.
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(c) Jessica Eve Rattner
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