Songs of No Provenance

byLydi Conklin

Format:

HardbackEbook

Pre-order:

AmazonApple BooksKobo

A suspenseful, wildly engaging debut novel following a musician spiraling in self-doubt and self-searching after a night – and a relationship – gone wrong.

Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. With the threat of an internet storm looming over her, Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she’s forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking – and her complicated history with a friend and mentee – while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.

Lydi Conklin boldly explores kink, shame, queer appropriation, fame hunger, cancel culture, trans nonbinary identity and how to make art without ego, all the while asking how Joan might forge a new future for herself.

Suffused with flashbacks to a musical underworld as seductive as it is seedy, Songs of no Provenance is a visceral, gutsy and profound debut novel about love, self-acceptance and clawing oneself to safety.

'Lydi Conklin has gathered up slippery ideas about art-making and desire and mentorship and gender and plunged an antihero for the ages through the heart of them all. Songs of No Provenance is a raw, empathetic novel of exceptional power'

Carmen Maria Machado

About Lydi Conklin

Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers Conference, Emory University, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529934984
  • Length: 352 pages
  • Price: £8.99
All editions