Authors

Lauren Fairbanks was born into a scholarly family where the written word was sacrosanct. She has written three books:

• Muzzle Thyself, a book of poetry (Dalkey Archive Press, 1991) 
• Sister Carrie, a novel (Dalkey Archive Press, 1993)
• SUPERPOWER(S.), a novel being released in January 2021

She studied with Gilbert Sorrentino and Richard Stern at the University of Scranton and University of Chicago. She received her master's degree from UChicago with a creative thesis.

Her partner in everything is Madan Jagernauth. Nigel Jagernauth, Lauren’s son, is a filmmaker. Steven Moore edited all three books. 

Reviews: 

Muzzle Thyself (1991)

“What a strange mixture of literariness and originality. Fairbanks magically meshes the rhythms and textures of American poetry … with her own feminine feminist and very angry voice and music.” 

—Kathy Acker

“Fairbanks's is a unique, fresh feminist voice, employing an aggressive use of language … with puns and wordplays (‘flatten all Latins,’ ‘splitting heirs’). Her word-slinging style reminds one of the early Gregory Corso. … [T]he overall effect can be stunning, creating a mood, a whole, a vibrant visual image. … Fairbanks displays courageous talent. Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.”

—Library Journal

Sister Carrie (1993)

“WELCOME TO THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN FICTION! Sister Carrie reads as if Dreiser said 'I love you' but didn't mean it, went to bed with Donald Barthelme and William Burroughs, and named the result Lauren Fairbanks.”

—Lance Olsen, author of Circus of the Mind in Motion

“[I]magine Fairbanks' Sister Carrie as a novel based on the life of Kathy Acker as written by Thomas Pynchon and Monique Wittig, ... its pun-happy, snide-aside, street-wise, typography-fascinated, can't-say-it-all-fast-enough-or-funny-enough breathlessness reminds me most of Old Bull Lee Burroughs hard at work cutting up the bars of the prisonhouse of language and fashioning them into booby-trapped works of art.” 

—Brooke Horvath, Cimarron Review

“Sister Carrie is a postmodern sweet-smelling verbal miasma of a woman and her words. … Fairbanks conducts her English like the raunchy mellifluous orchestra it is. … Fairbanks has given her language a high-octane lube job. … [H]er readers will find nothing to hold on to except … the constant promise of verbal land mines, slamming through sham notions of traditional story by grasping the dissonant word truth of today. … [C]ollage at its shocking best: polyphony in priceless polyester, Cerberus with all three mouths screaming out a single tale.” 

—Voice Literary Supplement, "Lit Hits: Our 25 Favorite Books of 1993"

“There is a Jacobean force of extravagant language and dark wit that drives every paragraph.” 

—Alexander Theroux, author of Darconville's Cat 

“Lauren Fairbanks is an elegant motormouth babbling gold … her surrealistic ingenuity, her slash-and-burn gift for satire, her tact with catastrophe. She has street smarts galore, but metaphysical smarts too, verging on Tiresian prudence.”

—Paul West, author of Love's Mansion

“... Fairbanks' sentences are densely packed verbal samples that read like a strange marriage between the drek-filled collages of Donald Barthelme and the subversive sensibilities of Kathy Acker.” 

—Mark Amerika, Philadelphia Inquirer 

“… Lauren Fairbanks's Sister Carrie is the nerviest and verviest … the funniest, savviest, and most original rites of passage work since Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School over a decade ago.” 

—Larry McCaffery, editor of Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation 

“A wickedly funny, volatile, surreal roller-coaster … involving sex, the street, and sharp social satire. Rivaling the novels of William S. Burroughs and outshining Mark Leyner, Sister Carrie reads at hip, hyperkinetic speed. Energetic and tight, this is a book of the future.” 

—Booklist 

“Fairbanks struts her stuff through this satyricon of self-revelation in a world gone cynical. … This is an exhilarating debut by an enormously gifted writer.” 

—Publishers Weekly 

“Fairbanks excels in spewing out rapid-fire imagery, wrenching irony, bizarre juxtapositions, and clever wordplay.” 

—Library Journal 

“Lauren Fairbanks's novel is a breathless romp with a postmodern Carrie Meeber, one that Dreiser would not recognize. … Fairbanks’s prose is fast-talking, her images hit-and-run, and her plot an intense race to the last page.” 

—Ellen G. Friedman, coeditor of Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction 

“… [T]he language: a dizzy, out of control rhetoric which, like the runaway heroine, rebels against the rules of syntax and meaning. … Sister Carrie is a rickety wild ride into the 21st century.” 

—Marta Deike, Minneapolis City Pages