Book Buzz: Agnes Lives! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton
“Agnes Lives! is a 24 hour novel. I had all of these feelings in 2018, 2020, that I was trying to find an outlet for. So I started creating this character in snatches of daily life. What would it be like for this character to go shopping, or try to buy a gun in Chinatown, and so on. And as I started to write this, I discovered more and more of her, and I thought the 24 hour time period would add a propulsive clock to the piece.”
― Hallie Elizabeth Newton, InterviewBooks Are Magic with David Lipsky
What booksellers are saying about Agnes Lives!
- Agnes Lives! explores themes of self-worth and self-indulgence in a pitiless world that demands women be everything to everyone at all times, highlighting the push and pull of embracing or rejecting those demands. Said demands push Agnes to the absolute extremes. This is a literary thriller that all strange book lovers are going to devour. I loved it!
― Jenny, Bookmarks, Winston-Salem, North Carolina | BUY
- Funny, delirious, shocking, and a wild, wild goose chase of a time. You’ll root for Agnes in her search for a potential killer and cheer every time she gets closer to reaching her goal.
― Joshua, The Underground Bookshop, Carrollton, Georgia | BUY
- A blistering manifesto of a book that crams so much into its pages; a kind of reverse American Psycho telling the story of one woman down-trodden by mid-2010’s rat race existence in New York. As wild, unexpected, and original as a hypnotic Instagram spiral, it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel.
― Doron, Octavia Books, New Orleans, Louisiana | BUY
- Agnes is like a piece of glass that our patriarchal, image-obsessed society has trampled all over…a smart commentary on toxic femininity, on being an aging woman, on the ways women feel pressured to sacrifice their bodies at the altars of men, on all the toxic little crimes men commit against women and women commit against themselves. It’s full of killer lines and insights about our culture and the characterization is precise and blazing. This novel is as enraging as it is insightful. So if you like chaotic, weird girl Lit. Fic. with an unhinged woman on an equally unhinged mission then take a big bite, this one’s worth the calories.
― Savannah, The Country Bookshop, Southern Pines, North Carolina | BUY
About Hallie Elizabeth Newton
Hallie Elizabeth Newton was born in Mississippi. A recipient of NYU’s Goldwater Fellowship, she won first prize for fiction in Columbia Journal’s 2020 Winter Contest. Agnes Lives! is her debut novel. She lives in New York.
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“I think that we certainly talk about pregnancy and motherhood and reproductive freedoms. These are conversations that we are having, but within pretty narrow parameters. And what I liked about this idea was the opportunity to talk about some of those issues from a different lens than usual — not least because so many people’s minds are already made up about so many of these ideas, and that means that we can’t really have a conversation. But if we change the lens, if we change the approach, if we change the givens and the parameters that we go in with, then we get to have a conversation.
I hope I don’t give too much away, but I was quite inspired by Witness, with Harrison Ford amongst the Amish. I was really interested in this idea of a gangster amongst peacemakers, which is really what Witness is. I find that really fascinating. I became interested in Celtic Christianity because it was very revolutionary at the time in ways that we slightly forget. This was a world of utter warlordism, a very, very violent world and it was pagan. All of that was predicated on the idea that it was good to be strong and kill people. If gods were with you, that’s what would happen. If gods weren’t with you, you’d be weak. The idea of a religion that was founded on the idea that you might want to be weak, or you might want to be humble, was completely insane to these people. I mean, they looked at it and just went, “You’re mad! What are you talking about?”
I could spend years in a cookbook shop and never get bored. Where do I begin? I love the weirdness of cookbooks; how they capture the larger culture of a specific time-period and tell the tale through the prism of food. Take, for example, one of my cookbook treasures: The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook by Robin Leach. It’s a time capsule of the eighties — glass block, Dynasty-style hairdos, Brooke Shields — and the food is as awful as the fashion. Or another favorite: A Treasury of Great Recipes by Vincent and Mary Price, a collection of all the menus that the famous horror maestro and his wife collected over their world travels in the ‘40s and ‘50s and the meals that they hosted for their friends in their exquisite Hollywood home. If I could jump into the pages of a cookbook, it might be that one.
