Yuka Igarashi’s first acquisition at Graywolf is a very cool-sounding novel by Lucy Ives.
By Emily Temple
June 2, 2021, 9:30am

Literary Hub is excited to report that Graywolf’s new Executive Editor Yuka Igarashi has made her very first acquisition for the beloved independent press: a new novel by Lucy Ives called Life Is Everywhere, which is currently scheduled to be published in Fall 2022. Here’s the skinny from Graywolf:

The novel is about Erin Adamo, a PhD student living in New York who, in the midst of a breakup with her husband, gets locked out of her apartment. She has with her a debit card, a Metrocard, a phone, and a bag containing papers. Instead of asking anyone for help, she goes to her university library and spends the night there.

That’s the whole plot, but the trick of the book is that it’s also made up of the contents of the bag that Erin is carrying, which includes a novella and novel she’s written, as well as her academic advisor’s book about (the fictional) Démocrite Charlus LeGouffre, a person of ambiguous gender born to a British prostitute living in Paris in the 1800s. Through these documents we start to see how both Erin and LeGouffre live inside dysfunctional systems—romantic relationships, family, academia, society—that erase women. Lucy is a brilliant writer on gender, and Life is Everywhere is smart, funny, and packed with ideas.

“I worked with Lucy Ives on her story collection Cosmogony and the novel Loudermilk and am delighted to be publishing Life Is Everywhere, in which we get to see Lucy’s outrageous wit, emotional precision, and sheer storytelling charisma working on an epic scale,” Igarashi told Literary Hub. “I think this book proposes a new kind of ‘systems novel.’ It’s about how individual selves act, and are acted upon, inside various systems—family, marriage, academia, gender, society—but it also reveals the instability of our notions of selves and of systems, and shows a new way to narrate the relationship between the two. Plus it’s just very fun to read, since it includes things like the history of botulism, a fragment of sculpture with mysterious powers, stolen artifacts, secret identities, and academic scandal.”

Fun to read and full of botulism? We’ll be first in line.