C. Michelle Lindley’s work can be found in Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2024 and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and a BA in English and Art History from the University of California at Berkeley.
The Nude is her first novel.
At the Guardian Lindley tagged five "novels about art – and also about so much more." One title on the list:
Luster by Raven LeilaniRead about another novel on the list.
Luster revolves around Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman navigating adulthood, racism at her dead-end corporate job, and a new relationship with a white man named Eric. When she meets Eric, Edie becomes unwittingly enmeshed in the complicated dynamics of his quasi-open marriage and relationship with his adopted Black daughter, Akila. All the while, her ambitions as a painter loom. Artfully rendered and featuring humorous, incisive prose, Luster is a call to arms on a Black woman’s right to pleasure and belonging, and a searing indictment of what it means to be creative in the treacherous world of American capitalism.
Luster is among Alana B. Lytle's eight top novels about destructive women and Forsyth Harmon's five top obsessive female relationships in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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