Teaching Notes for The Coupon Thief:
Use in the classroom to discuss: gathered narratives; borrowed writings; atomic fragmentations; double helixes; collaborative writing processes; hopeful dystopia; poetic/economical language; tonal shifts; semi-natural spaces; aggressively weird prose; trickster figures.
Pairs well with Reports, A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic, Weird Weeks (forthcoming).
The Coupon Thief by Lily Hoang
40 pages.
Perfect-bound.
Here is a hunger and here is a sea and here is a thief. But be wary: there are no boundaries to mark beginnings or endings. This is the project of The Coupon Thief. In this collection of microfictions, Lily Hoang borrows and stitches the words of forty authors, sometimes replicating clouds and waters and sometimes spiraling with kisses and knots. Who will you see in the canal? Who will have your heart?
Lily Hoang is the author of four books, including Changing, recipient of a PEN Open Books Award. Her choose-your-own adventure love story Old Cat Lady is forthcoming with 1913 Books in 2015. A Bestiary: Essays won the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Nonfiction Contest and is forthcoming in 2016. With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She teaches in the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she is Associate Department Head. She serves as Prose Editor at Puerto del Sol and Non-Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat.