The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty – Ha Jin
Yomei remains an adherent of the Stanislavskian method she learns in Russia. . . . Jin’s novel is, in many ways, an attempt to apply this principle to fiction.
While I was writing Headshot I didn’t feel like I was watching a boxing tournament, I felt like I was fighting in it. I was trying to write from a space of inside the girls’ bodies, and inside the space of the tournament. Youth sports tournaments can have their own physics.
The writing has nothing to hide behind. That alone can make a reader nervous. What’s even more nerve-rending is the prospect of living inside an artistic experiment when its creator has warned you there’s no trapdoor.
I keep thinking of STILL ALIVE as a queer Fight Club for the millennial generation. Like that earlier Gen-X novel, STILL ALIVE retains a critique of the empty promises of capitalism, one that centers queer women instead of macho men. In place of fist-fighting, we get fisting.