Fawn Parker
Biography
Fawn Parker is the author of Set-Point (ARP Books, 2019), Jolie Laide (Palimpsest Press, 2021), and Dumbshow (ARP Books, 2021). Her short story, "FEED MACHINE," was long-listed for the 2020 McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.
Fawn is co-founder of BAD NUDES Magazine, BAD BOOKS Press, and president of The Parker Agency. A current MA candidate at the University of Toronto, she is the recipient of the Adam Penn Gilders Award for Fiction (2019) and Concordia University's Irving Layton Award for Fiction (2017).
Short fiction and poetry can be found via EVENT Magazine, Joyland, The Puritan, Plenitude, Echolocation, Headlight Anthology, The Void Magazine, Soliloquies Anthology, Hobart, The Quietus, and elsewhere.
Fawn is represented by Stephanie Sinclair at CookeMcDermid.
She teaches the course CREATING AN ONLINE LITERARY MAGAZINE at the University of Toronto. Click here to sign up.
Featured Reviews
Set-Point
"Fawn Parker's recent novel, Set-Point blew me away. Parker's sensibility is contemporary, smart and funny; fans of auto-fiction by international writers like Ben Lerner or Elif Batuman will love her" — Joan Thomas, winner of the 2019 Governor General's Award for Fiction for Five Wives
"Parker’s talent makes writing a novel look easy – Lucy’s daily drags around Montreal are an elaborate, entertaining, ironic simulation on par with Seingård or the sexual labour she’s selling – but Set-Point aspires to more than effortless neutrality. In risking sentiment, it succeeds."
— Paige Cooper, Author of Zolitude
Set-Point is a novel about nothing. Or, not nothing, but certainly emptiness: the emptiness of virtual realities; of endless parody; of cartoon porn; of a purged stomach or a missing body part. Here, in Fawn Parker’s savagely ‘chill’ Montreal, student art, friendship, therapy, work, and relationships are cast as light as dust — a discordant counterpoint to Lucy’s fierce internal world of self-loathing, ego, and worry over her mother’s illness. It will make you feel like your old self again. Neurotic, paranoid, totally inadequate, completely insecure. It’s a pleasure.
— Spencer Gordon, author of Cruise Missile Liberals and Cosmo
True to her name, Lucy Frank shines a beam of lucidity on impossible beauty standards, Sisyphean dead-end jobs, tepid hookups, and noncommittal on-off relationships with friends and erotic partners. When her worlds collide and collapse, she seeks to escape, as if in a fairy-tale turned nightmare, from her own digital “breadcrumb trail.” To anomie and alienation reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh, candour that rivals Sally Rooney, and an explicitness suggestive of early Mary Gaitskill, Fawn Parker adds her own antic, absurdist, utterly distinctive sensibility. Set-Point takes us to the very edge of identity, virtual and lived.
— Kateri Lanthier, author of Reporting from Night and Siren
Looking Good and Having a Good Time
“Parker’s writing is characterized by a very dry brand of humour that takes you by surprise. Looking Good and Having a Good Time is an energetic read.”
– Broken Pencil
“Parker makes fun of her generation, and of contemporary literature. Magical realism has arrived in millennial Montreal.”
– Montreal Review of Books
“As I was reading Looking Good and Having A Good Time […] I found myself giggling line after line.”
– The Link Newspaper
“[Fawn] has made a weird little true world, which is better than my own, because it is always honest.”
– Probably Crying Review
Get In Touch
Representation: Stephanie Sinclair, CookeMcDermid Agency
Personal: fcgparker [at] gmail [dot] com