Ultraluminous

by Katherine Faw

Overview

One of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved in 2017," a BOMB's Looking Back on 2017: Literature Selection, a Paris Review Staff Pick, and one of Vulture's 10 Best Thriller Books of 2017.

Girlfriend. Prostitute. Addict. Terrorist? Who is K?

The daring new novel from Katherine Faw, the brilliant author of Young God, is a scintillating story of money, sex, and power told in Faw’s viciously sharp prose. A high-end, girlfriend-experience prostitute has just returned to her native New York City after more than a decade abroad—in Dubai, with a man she recalls only as the Sheikh—but it’s unclear why exactly she’s come back. Did things go bad for her? Does she have scores to settle?

Regardless, she has quickly made herself at home. She’s set up a rotation of clients—all of them in finance—each of whom has different delusions of how he is important to her. And she’s also met a man whom she doesn’t charge—a damaged former Army Ranger, back from Afghanistan.

Her days are strangely orderly: A repetition of dinners, personal grooming, museum exhibitions, sex, Duane Reades (she likes the sushi), cosmology, sex, gallery shows, nightclubs, heroin, sex, and art films (which she finds soothing). She finds the pattern confirming, but does she really believe it’s sustainable? Or do the barely discernible rifts in her routine suggest that something else is percolating under the surface? Could she have fallen for one of her bankers? Or do those supposed rifts suggest a pattern within the pattern, a larger scheme she’s not showing us, a truth that won’t be revealed until we can see everything?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374279660
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/05/2017
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Katherine Faw is the author of Ultraluminous, an Indie Next pick, which was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, BOMB, and Vulture. Her debut novel, Young God, was named a best book of the year by The Times Literary Supplement, The Houston Chronicle, and BuzzFeed. She was born in North Carolina. She lives in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

10/02/2017
Faw’s second novel (after Young God) pulses with an irresistible voice and the sense of impending catastrophe. The narrator, a prostitute who gives herself a different name beginning with K to every man, tells her story in sharp, crackling prose. She looks back often on her formative experiences with prostitution in Dubai with a man who had a dangerous career of his own. Now back in her native New York, her weeks are divided between men, aesthetic enhancement like pedicures and teeth bleaching, and her heroin habit. However, what could easily have turned into a blur of sex and drugs is kept in focus by concise but revealing details, such as when K desires “an egg custard that will only be texture, no taste,” one of many pieces that feel crucial in assembling the puzzle of her damaged, guarded soul. Such moments also keep her enigmatic humanity burning along with the undercurrent of hopelessness from the trauma of her past. Becoming men’s fantasies is as natural as breathing to her; her own identity disappears to make each man come alive, and she seems resentful of and careless with her own life. Yet she dates one man whom she loves, and her caring for him shows a softness even as her rage and despair grow. Faw’s writing is raw and not for all tastes, but this incisive character study, featuring an exceptionally clear and memorable prose style, should find its audience. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Co. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-09-07
Another unsparing novel from the author of Young God (2014). No one here has a name. There's "the junk-bond guy," "the calf's brain guy," "the art guy," and "the guy who buys me things." These are all clients. There's "the ex-Army Ranger," a lover. There's "the Sheik," a man she met in Dubai, another boyfriend. Finally, there's the narrator, who identifies herself only with a series of pseudonyms—Slavic diminutives of her real name, because everyone seems to think she's Polish or Russian, and she is willing to let people think what they think. As for her own thoughts, they are her only real possession, and she keeps them to herself. The damaged, emotionally reticent prostitute is a cliché, of course, but Faw's approach to this subject is inventive and surprising. Her heroine's caginess informs the shape of the novel. The story unfolds in a series of short vignettes, microfictions only tenuously connected by anything like a plot. Even in the private space of this text, the narrator reveals little about herself or the men who pay for her services. Every glimpse of the author's innermost self functions as a sign of how much she's withholding. Faw's language is simultaneously blunt and opaque, precise and obfuscating. Descriptions of sex, violence, and drug addiction are free from euphemism or romance, but crucial facts are often omitted. The narrator has returned to New York after working as a prostitute in the United Arab Emirates, and 9/11 casts a shadow over the story. But the reality that it's just as easy to buy a woman in the United States as it is in the Middle East makes easy moral oppositions impossible. The narrator keeps hold of her life by recognizing and following patterns, and a story that, at first, seems shapeless comes into focus at the end. To say that it is brilliant is not to say that it's pleasant. Artful and ruthless.

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Ultraluminous

"Startling, poignant, raw . . . The success of Faw's seismic story lies in a protagonist who, however improbably her life, is dynamic, true, and ultimately her own savior. Daring and original." —Katharine Uhrich, Booklist

"Faw’s second novel (after Young God) pulses with an irresistible voice and the sense of impending catastrophe . . . Faw’s writing is raw . . . an exceptionally clear and memorable prose style." —Publishers Weekly

Praise for Young God

“Badass.” —Vanity Fair

“Addictive.” —Jeva Lange, Vice

“Seductive . . . Reading [Young God] is like having a bottle rocket go off in your hands.” —Lisa Shea, Elle

“A powerful portrait of humanity in the face of everyday atrocity . . . It’s a quick read but likely to leave even the sturdiest stunned.” —Eimear McBride, The Guardian

“Invoking the dysfunctional families and bleak landscapes of Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Dorothy Allison . . . Young God is boundary-pushing fiction at its best.” —Julie Hakim Azzam, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Sweet Jesus is Young God terrifying and great. Katherine Faw Morris’s style is singular and ferocious and Nikki is one of the toughest, most electrifying, most unforgettable heroines I have ever encountered on the page. This is a furious blaze of a book that will rough you up and reorder your sense of the world and what’s possible in it. It’s a debut for the ages. Read it.” —Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth

“Radical, and at times shocking . . . An altogether remarkable debut.” —Peter Carty, Financial Times

“Like a bullet, like a bolt of lightning, like a speeding car, this debut novel goes faster and harder than anything you're likely to read this year.” —Stacey D’Erasmo, author of The Art of Intimacy

“Katherine Faw Morris delivers a brassknuckled gut-punch.” —Alex Houston, Newcity Lit

“Poetic, grim, and beautifully dark . . . Morris writes with splendid economy, chapters short as contests, and plenty of slashing insights on the rough world of throwaway lives and varieties of wrong.” —Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone

From the Publisher