Tell it Slant

Tell It Slant is a bold, luscious first novel by Beth Follett, publisher of one of Canada's most exciting and respected small presses, Pedlar Press. The novel tells – slantedly, of course – the story of Nora Flood, a young woman who lives between two sets of voices: those of her own fragmented desires and the internalized voices of western culture, which have always denigrated or refused her deepest desires. She struggles with these contradictory forces, overwhelmed, at times mute, seeking the roots of her psychosexual malaise, searching for the possibility of her own true voice, caught in an obsession that drags her away from the exploration of her own appetites and hungers into its sterile heart. But through the interventions of Djuna Barnes, creator of the literary Nora Flood of Barnes' novel Nightwood, this Nora begins to slip between the cracks and fissures of obsession to shape a life of her own. With language that is lush and startling and a shape that is disjointed and elliptical, Tell It Slant is a brave and beautiful book.