In her brilliant, hilarious, and at times shocking debut, Mona Awad simultaneously skewers the body image-obsessed culture that tells women they have no value outside their physical appearance, and delivers a tender and moving depiction of a lovably difficult young woman whose life is hijacked by her struggle to conform. As caustically funny as it is heartbreaking,13 Ways of Looking at aFat Girlintroduces a vital new voice in fiction.
Mona Awad is the author of Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It was a finalist for the New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award. It is currently optioned for film with Bad Robot Productions. Awad’s debut, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel, All’s Well, was longlisted for the International Dublin Award and was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror.
Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Atlantic, Time
Out New York, and The Globe and Mail
"Honest, searing, and necessary." —Elle
“Simultaneously tart and tender, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
is stunning...The way food and body image define Elizabeth’s life
is depressing and sad. But the book is neither. There is so much
humor here — much of it dark, but spot on, like Dolores in Wally
Lamb’s She’s Come Undone or Lena Dunham in Girls." —Washington
Post
“Heartbreaking . . . [rife] with beauty and humor . . . As
addictive as potato chips and as painful as the prospect of eating
nothing but 4-ounce portions of steamed fish for the rest of your
life.” —Chicago Tribune
“Gutting . . . Awad gets everything right and, throughout these
interconnected stories, reveals how absurd our culture is about
women and their bodies. Several sections had me in tears. . . . I
highly recommend this one.” —Roxane Gay (via Goodreads)
"Awad tells Lizzie’s story from a variety of different perspectives
and in different scenes, some deeply funny, some dreamlike, many
tragic. Throughout, her prose is lively, while her insight into the
often-baffling complexities of being a woman is touching and
sharp." —The Atlantic, "The Best Books We Missed This Year"
"Awad is a fine writer with a keen sense of black humor, which
makes this often sad story more entertaining than you might
expect." —Lynn Neary, NPR's "Guide To 2016’s Great Reads"
"A ferocious look at body image and how it permeates every aspect
of our lives. At times funny, at others heart-breaking, this is an
important one to read this year." —BookRiot, "The Best Books of
2016, So Far"
"Dark and caustically funny...[This] book somehow manages to strike
a balance between depressing and hilarious. —Time Out New
York, "The 15 Best Books of 2016"
"Awad's sensitive, unflinching depiction of [Lizzie's struggle] is
a valuable addition to the canon of American womanhood." —Time
"Moving." —The New York Times Book Review
“A novel in thirteen vignettes about the experience of being a
woman dealing with body image issues or simply put: The experience
of being a woman. . . . Even someone who has never struggled with
her weight should be able to see her teenage self in Awad’s pages.”
—The Rumpus
"With dark humor and heartbreaking honesty, Awad cuts away at diet
culture and the pressure on women to make thinness and beauty their
priority." —San Francisco Chronicle
“Awad explores the sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking ways
that a person’s struggle with body image can seep into every part
of her existence. . . . 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is not
really about how Lizzie March looks. . . . [it's] about how she
sees herself.” —Wall Street Journal
"Awad portrays Lizzie's humiliations with unflinching honesty and a
dose of dark humor." —NPR
"It's as if the writer has eavesdropped on your most pathetic,
smallest thoughts. . . . Awad's writing is heartbreaking and
witty, while her prose is insightful and sharp-elbowed in its
caustic edge. . . . [Lizzie is] a vulnerable, funny and fierce
narrator." —The Salt Lake Tribune
"Awad’s satiric edge is on display in her debut novel." —Los
Angeles Times
"[A] mordant coming-of-age novel." —O, The Oprah Magazine
"In this dark, honest debut, Awad sharply observes . . . the
struggles of growing up, growing out, and trying to slim down, at
any cost." —Marie Claire
"The nuance Awad adds to conceptions of weight and body image is
applied also to her realizations of female friendships. Lizzie’s
relationships with other women are at once petty and kind, jealous
and admiring." —HuffPost
"Blunt and funny, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a
refreshingly honest look at how society views physical appearance,
how we internalize those critiques and how that affects the way we
navigate the world." —Mashable
"Awad’s writing is white hot, and deserves to be invoked alongside
Gaitskill in its observation and cutting humor, its literary
pleasures. It’s impossible not to care for Lizzie: not a talking
point, but a sweet, calculating, hurt person—that is to say, a real
woman, who leaves that scarequote-worthy cliché miles behind. . . .
Fantastic new genre-bending fiction." —Tin House
"While many women writers are leaning toward a brand of feminism
that links all women by making sweeping (and often suffocating)
generalizations, Mona Awad insists on difference. . . . Lizzie
Smith is not the funny fat girl we’ve grown used to in literature
and popular culture. She isn’t a body empty of nuance, but one
loaded instead with fluffy musings about what it means, in fact, to
be a fat girl. . . . Awad’s tight control of the narrative and
the effective work that the 13 chapters accomplish makes it
impossible not to understand why Lizzie is doing what she’s
doing." —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Awad is an incredibly skilled writer, with a rare ability to
construct tiny moments of both acute empathy and astonishing depth.
. . . [and] a profoundly sensitive understanding of the subject
matter. . . . It’s impossible not to be deeply affected by [her]
prose. . . . A real narrative achievement.” —The Globe and Mail
(Canada)
“[This] darkly comic book isn’t afraid to shock.” —Minnesota Public
Radio, “The Best Books of 2016 (so far)”
"Empathetic, engaging and bitingly funny. . . . In subject and
voice, there are echoes of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and
Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, but neither has
the wit of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl." —The Irish Times
"Absorbing . . . Subtle but poignant . . . This sort of
intrafeminine aggression will be familiar to most women, whatever
side of the body war they’ve been on. But it is is a side of
experience that hasn’t been much explored by literary novelists."
—The Guardian
"A total must-read . . . Awad’s raw and empathetic prose is
alternately darkly humorous and painful to read. . . . If you’re a
woman living in the year 2016, you’ve felt some semblance of doubt,
pressure or stress about the way you look. As such, you need
to read Mona Awad’s fantastic new novel." —PureWow
“Mona Awad writes exactly what you’re thinking, and that’s one of
the many reasons you’re going to love her debut. . . . [13 Ways]
announces her as a writer with real insight not only to the mind,
but also to the heart.” —Bustle, "17 Of 2016’s Most Anticipated
Books"
"Funny and frank." —VICE
"As Lizzy examines the body she's never loved, our thin's-in,
thigh-gap-crazy world comes into focus." —Cosmopolitan
"Throughout these often raw, poignant stories, Awad adeptly skewers
the culture of fitness and dieting, a constant battle of
self-denial. . . . [An] insightful debut." —BookPage
“A painfully raw—and bitingly funny—debut . . . [Lizzie] gets under
your skin, and she stays there. Beautifully constructed; a
devastating novel but also a deeply empathetic one.” —Kirkus
Reviews, starred review
“Assured and terrific.” —Publishers Weekly
“Touching . . . Behind the title of Awad’s sharp first book, a
unique novel in 13 vignettes, is brazen-voiced Lizzie, who longs
for, tests, and prods the deep center of the cultural promise that
thinness, no matter how one achieves it, is the prerequisite for
happiness.” —Booklist
“This book sparkles with wit and at the same time comes across as
so transparent and genuine—Awad knows how to talk about the raw
struggles of female friendships, sex, contact, humanness, and her
voice is a wry celebration of all of this at once.” —Aimee Bender,
author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“Hilarious and cutting . . . Mona Awad has a gift for turning the
every day strange and luminous, for finding bright sparks of humor
in the deepest dark. She is a strikingly original and strikingly
talented new voice.” —Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me and The
Isle of Youth
“Luminous . . . full of sharp insight and sly humor . . . It seems
that Mona Awad can describe the imperfect nature of any love
perfectly: whether it’s love between friends, between mother and
daughter, husband and wife, woman and food.” —Katherine Heiny,
author of Single, Carefree, Mellow
“Remarkable . . . committed to the most honest and painful
portrayal and comprehension of what it means to be human, with all
its flaws and joys.” —Brian Evenson, author of Fugue State and
Immobility
"I loved this book!" —Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
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