Ashley Whitaker is a writer from Texas. She received her MFA in Prose from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program. Her work has appeared in Tin House, StoryQuarterly, and has received support from the Ragdale Foundation. She lives in Austin with her family.
Whitaker's first novel is Bitter Texas Honey.
At Electric Lit the author tagged eight novels that "satirize their main characters’ literary ambitions. Each ... features a writer main character at varying career stages, battling against their own ego." One title on the list:
Less by Andrew Sean GreerRead about the other novels on the list.
In Greer’s charming novel, 49-year-old “minor” author Arthur Less accepts a stack of invitations he would usually decline. He jaunts around the globe, to New York, Mexico, Italy, Germany, Japan, and India, to avoid attending, or even being in the same time zone as, the wedding of his longtime ex-lover. Throughout his journey, we are reminded of poor Arthur’s career insecurities. His narrator describes Less early on as “an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books.” Despite his perceived worldly failures, it is hard not to fall in love with Arthur Less by the end of this tenderhearted novel.
Less is among Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s eight contemporary novels with omniscient narrators and Gnesis Villar's seven novels about the struggle of being a writer and Sarah Skilton's six novel novels about novelists.
--Marshal Zeringue
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