![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Late Americans is set in Iowa City, the site of the University of Iowa, whose famous writers’ workshop Taylor attended. Both collections depict an ensemble of characters in their 20s, most of them MFA grad students at Midwestern universities. The same can’t be said for The Late Americans, a novel that is really a linked short story collection much like Taylor’s previous book, 2021’s Filthy Animals. But that novel is less about the act of creating an online persona than about the disorienting contrast between a real-life tragedy and how it feels to participate in a “stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own … one that you participate in, but that also acts upon you.” Nevertheless, Lockwood’s novel taps into and expands upon the voice and mind evident in her Twitter account, and the writer of both works (the feed and the book) is manifestly the same person. ![]() In her wonderful 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood-who is so good at tweeting that the New York Times Magazine profiled her-writes about the “certain airy prominence” her autobiographical main character attains thanks to an absurdist tweet gone viral. Unlike the other forms of celebrity, this one is small in scale and the object of deliberate creation on a more than daily basis. What it’s like to preside at the center of this illusion would make a fascinating subject for a fiction writer to take on. ![]()
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