June 2025
Passage Series #11
Design by Rissa Hochberger
Cover artwork by Marley Freeman
Softcover, 88 pages, 7.8 x 5.12 inches
ISBN: 979-8-9909878-5-2
Printed in Latvia
June 2025 (First edition of 1,500)
Sold out
February 2026 (Second printing of 2,000)
18 USD
About the book
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.
About the author
Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She is the author of THRESHOLES (2020) and The Somnambulist (2016). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of artist residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, Marble House Project, Jentel, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She is a faculty member of the Creative Writing MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She also teaches in XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement Master’s program at NYU. She was born in the Bronx.
Praise
The Time of the Novel is full of the wonderful contradictions that make (and break) a life. Lara Mimosa Montes has created an enchanting, tender experiment in impermanence—voiced by a narrator in constant search of her narration, full of sentences that seem always to be dissolving, reconstituting themselves, and dissolving again. Reading this book I was gripped—and changed.
—Maya Binyam
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
With this magical book, Lara Mimosa Montes induced me into the state she describes, where undoing yearns for coherence. As I read, my breathing slowed and the mundane became wondrous. I can think of few writers who track so exquisitely all the phenomenal and contradictory sensations that make up a life.
—Miguel Gutierrez
This is luminous.
—Publishers Weekly
It's been a long time since I was so instantly taken by a book. Lara Mimosa Montes is a master of mood and the forgotten lure of narration.
—Kevin Sampsell
"A future classic of our favourite genre, PLOTLESS FICTION."
—Type Books
Lara Mimosa Montes adeptly slows time to explore interiority and liminal territories. Her work is formally innovative and plays with the possibilities of narration, all while being fully tangible, present. Montes is daring, her work unafraid to wrestle with the most complex and foundational ideas, yet doing so on her own terms.
—2026 Whiting Award Selection Committee
Press
Benjamin Krusling, "Our Favorite Books of 2025," The Paris Review, December 12, 2025
Mary Karmelek, "Lara Mimosa Montes's The Time of the Novel," Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2025
"Between the Sentence and the Self," interview by Mia Funk, Creative Process, June 2025
Publishers Weekly, May 20, 2025
Drew Zeiba, "Coastal Landscape in Morning Light," Listen, angel Substack, May 2, 2025
Rhian Sasseen, "Whatever I have to do has not yet begun," phrase books Substack, April 2, 2025