![]() ![]() The shape of her want is chaotic, idiosyncratic and sometimes awkward. She is a creature of hunger, and what a pleasure it is to watch her find and take her desire. Leilani’s Edie is a remarkable character, bristling with intelligence, both clear-eyed and painfully vulnerable. In this excerpt, Edie navigates the social theater of her job at a children’s publishing imprint. There’s the technical brilliance of her long and spooling sentences, but really what you notice is the daring-the fearlessness of the language Leilani lays down, like a gauntlet before the reader. Reading certain passages in Leilani’s novel is like watching a virtuoso dash off a cadenza, or an acrobat perform a high wire routine. This is a book that made me want to laugh and cry and rage, sometimes all on a single page. ![]() ![]() It’s also, in Leilani’s hands, a world that is extremely funny. The world of Luster is equal parts absurd and deadly, laced with microaggressions, structured by racial capitalism and sexual hierarchy. It took me into corporate offices hung with decorative katanas, and inside an alarmingly claustrophobic open marriage. That’s what happened with Raven Leilani’s Luster, which took me on a roller coaster ride and through the doors of Comic Con. Like so many, I read for voice-and every now and then I fall for a voice so hard I’ll follow it anywhere. ![]()
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