Brittany Newell, who often writes and performs under the nom de plume Ratty St. John, is a 2017 Stanford graduate. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the winner of the Norman Mailer Award for Fiction. Oola is her first book.
"Newell nails the lure, intoxication, and fallout of obsessive love
(and its subsequent madness) that somehow seems a mandatory
requirement of growing up." -Elle "Stunning. . . compelling. . .
.Not since Lolita's Humbert Humbert has a narrator been as
unreliable as Leif, and as with reading Nabokov's masterpiece, the
experience of reading Oola is one which will leave the reader
pondering questions about love, desire, and possession long after
the last page has been turned." -NYLON, "The 10 Best Books to Read
in April" "Electrifying" -Harper's Bazaar, "14 New Books You Need
to Read in April"
"[Oola] takes a major twist, from love story to something decidedly
more interesting and experimental." -Refinery29, "The Best Reads of
April Are Right Here" "Original, astute. . . Newell's insight,
intelligence, and prose are all clearly prodigious, which is
obvious in her creation of this book, which is both subtle and
outrageous, wonderfully readable yet philosophically challenging."
-Ilana Masad, Electric Literature "Oola is so good." -Dana
Schwartz, New York Observer
"A fascinating look at what happens when lost souls try to find
themselves in each other."-Quail Bell Magazine "[Oola is a] twisted
debut, testing the boundaries between love, obsession, and
identity. . . .Newell's rangy, circuitous tale is a kind of queer
Nadja for millennials with a self-satirizing--and satisfying--bite.
A dreamy and provocative exploration of sex, privilege, and
self-discovery." -Kirkus "Lush, edgy, lyrical, bad-ass, pensive,
taxing--it's hard to paint Oola into a picture that captures its
striking prose and fearless curiosity about identity and obsession.
. . .is a novel of discovery--ever shifting and digging deeper. It
is a diary, a romance, a dark trip over the edge. [Oola] capture[s]
today's zeitgeist of an experimental, hungry, indulgent youth."
-Shelf Awareness "Her searching high beams on privilege's victims
and beneficiaries, the fluidity of gender, the lonely writer's
life, and love's desire to possess reflect Newell's obvious talent
for observation and care with words." -Booklist ". . .I fell hard
for Oola. A gloriously labyrinthine love story, packing major verve
and form. . .The prose is satisfyingly rich and thick, and often
left me thunderstruck. It strikes that perfect literary balance
between articulacy and mystery. I can't tell you how many sentences
I re-read. It's the kind of book you want to linger in and never
leave; the kind of book that DOES things to you. . .Poetic,
inspiring, just wow. Brittany Newell is truly one to watch! . .
.There is an energy here that runs to the end of its leash but is
still beautifully controlled. So much is captured within its pages.
In short: I adored it." -Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals "The
narrator of Oola is unlike anyone I've read before--but, more
important, Brittany Newell writes prose unlike anyone I've read
before: exquisitely, strangely, and with an electric spark of black
humor. I wish "eerily beautiful" weren't a clich�, because it
perfectly describes this debut." -Teddy Wayne, author of The Love
Song of Jonny Valentine, Kapitoil, and Loner "Every now and then, I
come across a voice that sounds like no one else, a cadence and
vocabulary so specific that it feels like the beginning of a new
genre. Brittany Newell writes like that; the way her mind works is
so devilishly dark and achingly tender that I kept wanting to put
the book down in order to savor it for longer. Many people have
been called "bold new voices" in American fiction, but Newell earns
the title. This debut is the beginning of a career I hope to watch
for decades to come." -Rachel Syme
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