Paige Lewis — Canon
Poet and novelist Paige Lewis reads from Canon, a strange and inventive novel following two unlikely heroes on divine quests, at Politics and Prose.
Why we picked this
Lewis is a poet first, and that shows in how her fiction moves — sentence-level precision, imagery that accumulates into something larger. A rare reading that rewards attention.
Paige Lewis, whose debut poetry collection Space Struck was one of the most praised first books of recent years, turns to fiction with Canon — a novel that sends two unlikely heroes on quests to win God’s favor. The premise is strange and the execution stranger still, but Lewis brings the same verbal precision and capacity for wonder that made her poems remarkable.
Lewis is a poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and whose sensitivity to language carries directly into her prose. Canon draws on myth, religious tradition, and comic invention in ways that resist easy categorization. It is the kind of literary fiction that reminds you what the form can do when it isn’t trying to be something more respectable.
The event is free and open to the public, with a livestream available. Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington DC.