Carole Maso

Carole Maso is an American novelist and experimental prose writer whose work occupies a singular position at the intersection of poetry, fiction, and literary theory. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at Vassar College, Maso has spent her career pushing against the conventions of the novel form, exploring what prose can do when it surrenders narrative linearity and embraces the associative, musical logic of lyric poetry. She is a professor in the literary arts program at Brown University, where she has taught for many years and profoundly influenced generations of experimental writers.

Her debut novel, Ghost Dance (1986), announced her as a writer of exceptional gifts and unconventional ambitions. But it was Ava (1993) that established her reputation as one of the most daring and original prose writers in America. Ava follows the dying thoughts of a woman on the last day of her life, rendered in fragments, quotations, images, and incantatory repetitions that create an experience closer to reading poetry than conventional fiction. The novel has been compared to Woolf’s The Waves and Beckett’s late prose, and it remains one of the definitive texts of late-twentieth-century American literary experimentation. The Art Lover (1990), which interweaves multiple narrative strands with critical and autobiographical asides, and The American Woman in the Chinese Hat (1994) further extended her formal experiments.

Maso’s other major works include Aureole (1996), a lyric prose meditation on the erotic, and Break Every Rule (2000), a collection of essays that articulates her poetics and her understanding of the novel’s possibilities. Throughout her career she has been a passionate advocate for experimental writing and an important voice in the ongoing conversation about what literature can and should do. Her work has been published and reviewed internationally and she has lectured and read at universities, galleries, and literary festivals across the United States and Europe.

Maso’s influence on younger writers — particularly those working in hybrid forms, lyric essays, and prose poetry — has been considerable, and her teaching at Brown has shaped a generation of writers committed to formal experimentation. She is a writer’s writer in the best sense: a figure whose commitment to the possibilities of language and form has inspired and challenged everyone who has encountered her work.