Elizabeth Hatmaker

Elizabeth Hatmaker has a quiet way of crunching up our world. She excels in shaking out the dirty little corners of the mind, particularly the mind of misogynist history. In the person of Elizabeth Short, the so-called "Black Dahlia," she has found her heroine, the way Leonard Cohen found Joan of Arc--or perhaps how Raymond Queneau found Zazie in the metro--for in Girl we see Elizabeth Short refracted and perfected through multiple stylistic prisms and processes. —Dodie Bellamy