My Lesbian Novel

"The triumph of this book is to turn our current cultural obsession with all sorts of hybrids and mixtures from an aesthetic challenge into an urgent question of how we can make lives alongside each other. As all the best writers of comedy know, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen, the pleasure of falling in love is a structural pleasure: life at these moments is more narrative than non-narrative. Gladman makes the diagrammatic structure of comedy explicit and in doing so braids together her self-conscious interest in romance fiction as a genre and her growing obsession with it as a source of pleasure."—Lara Feigel, The Guardian

“My Lesbian Novel is a brilliant fusion of improvisational narrative and aesthetic treatise. It’s fiction and not. It’s also a hoot. And even (eventually) hot—with charm, it swirls horniness with helplessly nerdy literariness.”—Megan Milks, 4Columns

“My Lesbian Novel takes on a new genre for Gladman, the Happily Ever After, a romance in which you know that the lovers will find their way. This requires Gladman to set up two couples: as she figures out how to get June and Thena into each other’s arms, she also arranges a marriage between romance and literary fiction. . . . Gladman has always been comfortable with self-referentiality, but My Lesbian Novel is her most explicit account yet of the creative act.”—Rainer Diana Hamilton, Frieze

“My Lesbian Novel is a genre-bending celebration of lesbian desire that offers an innovative shape for queer romance, a craft lecture spooning its own novel. Gladman shows that true romance emerges through dialogue, shaped between partners, no matter if they are lovers or writers wrestling with love.”—Erin Vachon, The Rumpus

"My Lesbian Novel makes up its own math, rewires a plot from scratch, offers everything one might want from a romance novel, rooted in both quotidian and fantastical matters—hot sex scenes, chance encounters in the best of public spaces, parks and museums, and the best offering of all: instructions on how to write your own."—Ayaz O. Muratoglu, The Brooklyn Rail

“Gladman doesn’t simply deliver the lesbian novel you may expect from the title . . . [the] book moves from intellectual ambition to bodily yearning, while exploring Gladman’s own compulsions to articulate thought in writing or to transcribe gesture in drawing.”—John Vincler, Cultured

“An expansive, experimental, genre-bending new work from Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel explores art-making, queerness, philosophy, desire, and identity as an artist.”—Autostraddle, “Most Anticipated Queer Books of Fall 2024”

“My Lesbian Novel is philosophical and funny and optimistic and frustrated and needy because it desires a literature that doesn’t quite exist yet.”—Maggie Lange, Purse Books

“A perfect introduction to all things Gladman, certain to hook a whole new swath of readers.”—Drew Broussard, LitHub

"My Lesbian Novel represents an arresting, dialogic approach to the philosophy of lesbian and queer narration and a new triumph in Gladman’s ever-innovative body of work."—John Keene

"Readers of Gladman’s previous work will recognize her brilliant thinking and penchant for challenging experiments, though this is her most accessible book yet. . . . It’s a knockout." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"I’ll follow Renee Gladman anywhere. Her form-breaking books are otherworldly in their glories and when I found out she was writing a romance novel (well, sort of), I decided I didn’t need to know a single thing more and immediately ordered it. Of course, it is far stranger and trickier than that—but it’s also Renee Gladman tackling the hot genre!! Let’s go!!"—Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated”

"Gladman is, easily, one of the most intriguing and important writers of our time."—Amina Cain

"No one writes prose like Renee Gladman."—Lucy Corin

"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."—Eileen Myles

"Reading Gladman, I sometimes feel I’m watching a mastermind manipulate a Rubik’s Cube, except the goal isn’t to solve it but to present every possible arrangement."—Ben Purkert, The Rumpus

"Gladman’s precise and incisive writing makes me feel like I’m right alongside her investigating the limits of literature. It’s an adventure into the avant-garde. Also, I will read anything that comes from Dorothy!"—Laura Hughes (co-owner, Basket Books & Art in Houston, TX)

"My Lesbian Novel refuses to settle the question of the visible: life ends, but writing never really does, and Gladman has followed a sentence that moves us around corners as we read it."—Charles Theonia, BOMB "Editor's Choice"