Her incisive humor and razor-sharp writing, punctuated with references to postmodern literary theory and the whole range of the emoji keyboard, melds the current with the surreal, the twee with the violent. It’s a monster that I’ll never be able to resist.” The Boston-based author, who also wrote 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, plays delicately with feminine cliches and the oft-hollow pretenses of the graduate collegiate world. “There’s always been to me something kind of horrific about that. “ The Bunnies are so hyper-feminine,” Awad tells me over an appropriately quaint miniature cortado. The novel is set at a fictional, idyllic college campus in New England among a particular group of well-coiffed MFA writing students who nibble on mini cupcakes and call one another “Bunny.” Following the cardinal logic of a teen movie à la Heathers, a cynical outsider, Samantha, is drawn by magnetic force to the allure of the Bunnies, gradually ensorcelled by their “creative workshops,” in which they transform real, live bunnies into real, live men-complete with brooding, blue-eyed gazes and Proust. In Mona Awad’s new novel, Bunny (out today from Penguin) the figure embodies all of that, blown up-literally-and melded into male fantasy. The bunny is perhaps the singular most versatile mammalian image in modern culture: one of innocence, one of sex, one of lateness, one of sheer horror.
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