Discipline - Hardcover

by Larissa Pham (Author)

A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a "lit world phenom" (Harper's Bazaar)

"An exhilarating, exquisite book, full of an eerie intelligence and startling compassion . . . a pitch-perfect novel."--Ayșegül Savaș, author of The Anthropologists

A BEST BOOK OF THE SEASON: Bustle, Debutiful, Harper's Bazaar

I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. Yet I don't know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow.

Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she's seeking answers--about how to live a good life and what it means to make art--through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends.

But when the antagonist of her novel--her old painting professor--reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her that he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it.

A pristine and provocative high-wire act toggling the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive and the possibilities that lie beyond them, Discipline launches a spellbinding inquiry into the nature of art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

Author Biography

Larissa Pham is the author of the essay collection Pop Song, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Aperture, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is an assistant professor of writing at The New School. Discipline is her first novel.