Reines de la Nuit
MFA core faculty member Alexander Chee spoke with Alison Kinney of the LA Review of Books about his novel, Queen of the Night.
"My interest in women singers from this period is that they had freedoms that regular women did not have, but they had that freedom only so long as they were celebrities. To have your value as an artist determine so much of your value as a person — right down to your ability to go out alone to a restaurant or to travel by yourself — that was incredibly interesting to me. One of the tasks of the novel was really imagining how difficult it was to live as a woman. There were always free-spirited women who would push boundaries, break laws, and do the things that they wanted to do, but there was still this vast category of behavior that was regulated intensely."