From the acclaimed author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night, an acidly funny, raw, and devastating love story of a decrepit, fallen film star and the young feminist filmmaker who revives his career.

Set in disparate parts of Los Angeles, Chicken uproariously, grievously, relates the collision and inevitably ruinous paths of two incendiary figures. One is the once beautiful and very famous Parnell Wilde, a maverick actor arrogant in his disastrous fall. The other is Annabel Wrath, a much younger, idiosyncratic cult filmmaker with contradictory motives for seeking the older man out.

The two are profoundly altered by their meeting and its harrowing denouement and manage to save each other from their paths of torment and dizzying spirals of decline. But when Parnell is offered the chance to perform in the sequel to Ultraviolence, the feature film that made him famous — and to work again with its brilliant but merciless director — he and Annabel are forced to wrestle with their fractured pasts as the extreme, fleeting, and dangerous world of fame threatens to divide them.

Poet, author, and novelist Lynn Crosbie was born and raised in Montreal. An award-winning journalist and cultural critic, she has written about fashion, sports, art, and celebrity. She has a Ph.D. in English literature and a background in visual studies; she teaches at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Her volumes of poetry and prose include Queen Rat, Dorothy L’Amour, and Liar. She is the author of the controversial book Paul’s Case, about the Paul Bernardo–Karla Homolka murders, as well as the novels Life Is About Losing Everything and Where Did You Sleep Last Night, a Trillium Book Award finalist. Her most recent book is a collection of poems about her father, entitled The Corpses of the Future.

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Crosbie’s prose is seductive and deft, and imbued with yearning . . . Chicken sounds a clarion call for the necessity and potential of transgressive literature — the kind that allows difficult, conflicting truths to exist simultaneously. Crosbie defiantly acknowledges both the deviant and the sacred, the romantics and rebels that exist in all of us.

Quill and Quire

Chicken, the new novel by Toronto author and poet Lynn Crosbie, is a clamorous, electrifying kaleidoscope of sex and violence that veers toward sensory overload. But just when you think you can’t take any more, there are moments of desperate tenderness and melancholy that almost make you weep. Oh, and it’s funny too.

Toronto Star