Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur and In the Beggarly Style of Imitation. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Maclean's, Hazlitt, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and The Toronto Star. The National Post has hailed his writing as "an inventive escape from the conventional."
Ah-Sen's latest novel is Kilworthy Tanner.
At Lit Hub the author tagged five works of fiction with (very) bad mentors, including:
Richard Hell, GodlikeRead about the other entries on the list.
Godlike is the most memorable twenty-first-century novel that I have come across about the insupportable delusion governing literary circles. Informed by pedantic cultural policing and petty squabbling, the 1970s New York City poetry scene unsurprisingly implodes on itself.
By 1997, Paul Vaughn, a semi-prominent poet from the era, is convalescing in a hospital room following a nervous breakdown. Most of his contemporaries are dead or dying, completely unknown to the broader culture. As he toys with the idea ofwriting his memoirs, Vaughn’s thoughts turn to his dalliance with a sixteen-year-old poetic genius named Randall Terence Wode.
While Paul held influence in the poetry world, he could open any door for his underage, ambitious lover; it was the sexually confident Wode, however, who helped guide Paul through a queer awakening after he decided to abandon his wife and unborn son. The poets’ burgeoning relationship takes on a master and servant dynamic, though who occupies which position is anyone’s guess with the constant jockeying that goes on between the hot-blooded writers.
Hell’s novel problematizes the idea that there can only be one injured party in any sexual imbroglio, and goes to great lengths to source the many indignities ill-suited partners subject their loved ones to, seemingly as a matter of form.
--Marshal Zeringue
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