We're wrapping up this week with a recording from Lisa Samuels, a multi-modal author and artist living and working in Aotearoa New Zealand. She recently sent along a recording, made by Tim Page between 2019–2020 at the Waipapa Taumata Rau Sound Studios, of her reading her novel Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015) in its entirety.
Tender Girl, which you can read here, revisits the Comte de Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (1868), wherein "the hero copulates with a female shark in the frenzied sea of a shipwreck." Samuels' novel is the story of that "visceral Little Mermaid," who "comes out from ocean and crosses the land of the father, finding speech, sex, law, violence, and art."
Tender Girl has been segmented into a total of sixteen MP3 files, corresponding to its introduction and prelude, fourteen chapters, and post-lude, making it even easier to listen to on your commute or while on a jog. It's one of several recordings you'll find on PennSound's author page for Samuels, including a Segue Series reading at Zinc Bar from 2015, a Heatstrings recording from the 2015 Modernist Studies Association conference, two appearances on LA Lit, and the two-CD set Tomorrowland (Deep Surface Productions, 2012), along with external links to a number of projects. Click here to start listening.
