MONTES, Lara Mimosa
The Time of the Novel

A disaffected young woman seeking self-estrangement and withdrawal from the world decides to quit her day job as a bookseller to live out, or live in, an experiment: to become a full-time narrator. She moves through sentences, afternoons, a rented apartment, an artist’s studio, a party, the post office with the flowering focus of a realist novel, transposing physical and social life to the space of fiction. As she chronicles the process of becoming a subject in writing, the narrator confronts her fantasy of uninterrupted interiority—and its limits.

What is “fiction” and how does one “enter” into it? Composed in the tense of Literature, Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel is a book about detours, psychic swerves, and surprising encounters with the Real as it converges with the written. [publishers’ note]

Cover artwork by Marley Freeman.

“The Time of the Novel is a vessel brimming with a strange, liquid narration, its depths and surfaces rippling with ‘free associative micro-flows’— to read it is to wait for the overspill: the run-off of a singular experiment in literature and life that has, in fact, already begun.”
—Kate Briggs

“Spellbinding. Reads like a thriller, thinks like a philosopher, and enchants like a poet of the first order. Reality is now permanently warped because this book exists.”
—Paul Chan

Published by Wendy's Subway, 2025
Design by Rissa Hochberger
Literature