the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes.
O'Connor's new novel is Whale Fall.
At Electric Lit she tagged eight novels that are
set on unnamed or fictional islands; making them not grounded in a specific geography of place, but in the idea of an island. These unnamed islands have a global reach across Europe, Asia, East Africa, and North America, but the islands’ conditions—of isolation, of insularity, of instability—point to similar underlying ideas of disruption, allegory, colonial legacy and environmental care, forming an archipelago of novels mapping their connections to each other.One title on O'Connor's list:
How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius TarantoRead about the other entries on the list.
Taranto’s fictional island off the coast of Connecticut hosts the Rubin Institute, a millionaire-funded university staffed by the “cancellees and deplorables” of traditional academia.
It’s one of a few books on this list that uses an island setting for a fabular, allegorical narrative, the island setting allowing for a contained mini-society that reads heavy with symbolism. The novel is sharp and funny, skewering the notion of modern cancel culture with exile to a phallic building. Its explorations of academic and free speech are suitably messy and ungratifying; as on the mutable ground of the shore, you never know quite where you stand.
--Marshal Zeringue
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