Susann Cokal

Susann Cokal is an American contemporary fiction author and academic. Cokal has contributed short stories to anthologies and journals including "Prairie Schooner", "Hayden's Ferry Review", "Bellevue Literary Review", and "Gulf Stream". She has also contributed essays about contemporary writers to "Critique and Centennial Review". She is also a reviewer of fiction for the "New York Times Book Review".

Cokal was an assistant professor of creative writing and modern literature at California Polytechnic State University. She is now a professor of literature and creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. The range of her interests can be seen in her contributions to the St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture on abortion, supermodels, Kate Moss, and zoos.

Fiction

Cokal told Contemporary Authors that some of the inspiration for her first novel, Mirabilis, "came from the year I lived in Poitiers, France. In between studying medieval art and history, I used to sneak into a decrepit medieval church whose nave was open to the sky. That church (renamed) is where "Mirabilis" begins. I wrote about a wet nurse because I'm fascinated with the idea that no matter how 'civilized' we've become, we still need this very primal function; also, wet nursing was the more honorable way for a woman to make a living from her body."

Cokal's first novel, "Mirabilis" [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/042518532X] is set in the fourteenth century in Villeneuve, France. Its protagonist is a wet nurse whose breasts provide an unending supply of milk. Reviewing the book for the "Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide", Joy Parks commented, "Mirabilis is original, humorous, and fascinatingly bizarre, an enigmatic story wrapped in a gauze of feminine sensuality." In The New York Times, Sudip Bose wrote, "Cokal's prose is vivid, and she is adept at scenes ... that recreate a distant and terrifying world."

The book's (fictional) endnotes about the settings and characters were convincing enough that many readers presumed the book was based on real incidents. They are, however, fictional.

Cokal's second novel, "Breath and Bones", was released in 2005. (A paperback edition was released in 2006.) It is a comic picaresque whose protagonist, an artists' model and muse named Famke, travels the western United States in the 1880s. Humor, sexuality and Cokal's vivid writing abound. Reviews, while overall positive, were more mixed than for Mirabilis; though Cokal intended the book to be a romp, some critics called the book unrealistic.

Wrote The New York Times: "Cokal's storytelling blends the morbid and the titillating with imaginative exuberance. And while the story of Famke's quest is no literary masterpiece, it brings to mind the question Martin Amis asked of "Lolita": how was it possible to limit her adventures to "this 300-page blue streak -- to something so embarrassingly funny, so unstoppably inspired, so impossibly racy?"

Works

* Mirabilis, Putnam (New York, NY), 2001
* Breath and Bones, Unbridled Books (Denver, CO), 2005.

ources

* Booklist, June 1, 2001, Nancy Pearl, review of Mirabilis, p. 1835.
* Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2001, Sandra Scofield, review of Mirabilis, p. 4.
* Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, September, 2001, Joy Parks, review of Mirabilis, p. 38.
* Library Journal, June 15, 2001, Wendy Bethel, review of Mirabilis, p. 101.
* New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 1, 2001, Susan Larson, review of Mirabilis.
* New York Times, September 23, 2001, Sudip Bose, review of Mirabilis, p. 24.
* Publishers Weekly, June 11, 2001, review of Mirabilis, p. 56.
* Washington Post, July 27, 2001, Carolyn See, review of Mirabilis, p. 24.