Well, this is really an amazing night.
And actually, I love my job, and I had to say to myself,
Aurelie, do not cry when you go up
to the microphone, about how much
you love your job and these people,
and this incredible way of living where we share
each other's words and stories.
No, don't cry.
[LAUGHTER]
Just laugh instead, because it's just quite a great thing.
The narrator of Natasha Stagg's first novel,
Surveys, works at the Tucson Mall, a place that had not
previously been properly scrutinized,
and certainly not by a razor-sharp cultural critic
and prose stylist.
Colleen, a survey taker in her early 20s,
is dangerously bored, frequently hung over, and poised
for an extreme makeover.
She is as ruthlessly observant as she
is lonely and dissatisfied.
This is a quote from the book, "When teenagers
walked by and scoffed, looking like mermaids on ships,
encrusted with rhinestone barnacles,
their neon-accented phones and crap
from Claire's, their banded braces and their piercings,
they looked out of reach, even though I was only a couple
of years older."
The intersection of personal architecture,
the building of self, and its context,
in this case, an apparently mundane retail venue,
is precisely explored in this gorgeous novel, which
also serves as a feminist reassessment of image
and commodity, and a bold rethinking
of the psychological paradigm and literature.
Some of the strongest forces in a life can be invisible.
Colleen soon busts out of the land
of mermaids, Victoria's Secret dreamers, and sicko old men
neighbors to emerge as a disconcerting new personage,
a figure of no fixed address and no fixed identity.
She moves to LA to be with this famous guy
that she hooked up with online.
And together, they build the semblance
of a relationship, a virtual fairytale kingdom
to live in or near, and to share, most of all,
with tens of thousands of followers on social media.
We're asked to consider, where does life itself dwell?
Conventionally, we might say it is within the self.
But Natasha storms this particular castle.
It's not that there's no there there,
but that the there and the not there
unite and realign the parameters of love and identity.
Surveys came out this year with Semiotext(e) press,
a press called by Rick Moody, "The leading edge
of the most incendiary and exciting
intellectual revolution in the West," by the way.
[LAUGHTER]
It's been reviewed widely, and with acclaim,
in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times,
The LA Times, and elsewhere.
Natasha wrote the first draft while she was at the U of A
in my novel-writing class--
[LAUGHTER]
--in fact, [CHUCKLES] back in 2010.
I was so impressed by those first pages
by Natasha's unique visionary style,
and also by the conceptual framework of the narrative.
Reading the book in final form blew me away.
Natasha lives in New York, where she
was an editor for V Magazine for four years.
She writes about fashion, art, music, and culture
for Artforum, Paris Review, and other venues.
Her fiction and essays are magnetic, oracular, erudite,
and pleasurable.
Look up her Ask Natasha column for micro-trends
such as dying armpit hair or memes of impossible heels.
Read her essay, Trends and their Discontents,
written for the 9th Berlin Biennale.
The bottom line is that every era
needs a guide and a translator.
Natasha Stagg is here for you.
[APPLAUSE]