On September 24, 2025, Lara Mimosa Montes joined Re'al Christian for a conversation on The Time of the Novel, hosted by The Brooklyn Rail. See the recording of the event below.
About the speakers
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.
Re'al Christian is a writer, critic, editor, and art historian based in Queens. Her work explores issues related to identity, diasporas, ecology, media, and materiality. Her criticism, essays, and interviews have appeared in BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Artforum, and ART PAPERS, where she's a Contributing Editor. She has written texts for catalogues and anthologies. She is the editor of the digital publishing series Post/doc (2022–present) and co-editor of the anthology As for Protocols (2025). Christian is the Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. She received her MA in Art History from Hunter College. She holds a bachelor’s degree from NYU, where she majored in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication.
Lara Mimosa Montes, The Time of the Novel, pp. 76–77. Photo: Justin Lubliner
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.