M.F.A. Brown '94
B.A. Duke '92

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Lucy Corin is a fiction writer. She is the author of the novel The Swank Hotel, (Graywolf, 2021) as well as the short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney's Books, 2013), and The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books, 2007), and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2 in 2004). Her work has appeared in Harpers, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and Tin House Magazine, and in anthologies such as New American Stories (Vintage Contemporaries). She's been the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize and a Fellowship in Literature from the NEA.

Publication Spotlight

At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing — again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a “responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage”) and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable, something impossible happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed, through Lucy Corin’s idiosyncratic magic, into shimmering sites of the uncanny.

The story that swirls around Em moves through several perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the tart-tongued, failing manager at her office; Jack, the man with whom Frank has had a love affair for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works for them and falls in love with Ad. Through them Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and even in language itself.

The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first century America.

Email:  lcorin@ucdavis.edu