Fawn Parker
Biography
Fawn Parker is a writer and editor based in Montreal. A graduate of Concordia University's honours English and creative writing program, Fawn was awarded the Irving Layton Award for Fiction in 2017. She is an MA candidate at the University of Toronto in the field of creative writing. Fawn is co-founder of BAD NUDES Magazine and BAD BOOKS Press. She is the author of Set-Point (ARP, 2019) and Jolie-Laide (Palimpsest, 2021), as well as multiple chapbooks and short collections.
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
Montreal, QC, Canada