Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur and In the Beggarly Style of Imitation. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Maclean's, Hazlitt, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and The Toronto Star. The National Post has hailed his writing as "an inventive escape from the conventional."
Ah-Sen's latest novel is Kilworthy Tanner.
At Lit Hub the author tagged five works of fiction with (very) bad mentors, including:
Paige Cooper, ZolitudeRead about another entry on the list.
The women in Paige Cooper’s speculative collection Zolitude find themselves at the mercy of imbalanced power arrangements. Whether they are wriggling under the thumb of imperious handlers or exercising their wills in arenas of romantic destiny, Cooper’s characters endure the inflexibility of their situations.
A child prodigy under the eye of Henry Kissinger develops a time machine, meeting multiple versions of herself along the way to imperialist world domination. A call girl falls in love with a police officer who rides a cryptozoological wingedgelding and delights in breaking up protest assemblies. The driver of a bookmobile providing succor to a secluded community of convicts begins a relationship with a registered sex offender.
The thorny complications surrounding mentorship rear their head most explicitly in a story called “Ryan & Irene, Irene & Ryan,” where an injured publicist named Mad must intercede in her pop star client’s doomed relationship with a producer who sends mail bombs to anyone preventing a reunion with his protege. “He deletes truth like weather deletes history, imperfectly,” Mad thinks to herself. “He says Irene has victimized herself, twisted everything her way….Forgiveness is the temptation she’s damned to.”
Cooper’s stories depict the fluctuating emotional frequencies between people in times of duress, and the beauty of such an artistic project lies not only in the wide field of action entailed by such interpersonal dynamics, but in the moral trajectory suggested by its consideration of feminist principles.
--Marshal Zeringue
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