Paper ApartmentMolly Jean Bennett
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Paper Apartment constructs the imagined histories of three people from their left-behind effects. Reclusive street photographer Vivian Maier moves invisibly through crowded parks and beaches in New York and Chicago, making hundreds of thousands of images that she will show to no one. Bennett’s late great aunt, an accomplished computer technician and hobbyist bow hunter, obsessively amasses phone books and electric bills. An unknown man living alone in rural Virginia saves his sister’s unanswered letters to him. Told in short prose fragments that leap across time and space into specific, sensory scenes, Paper Apartment knits together the private worlds of these solitary collectors.
AN EXCERPT FROM EP 71 “V.M.’s body—100,000 negatives—was discovered in a locker at a thrift auction. I remember one shot in particular, of a policeman holding a fat lady in a polyester housedress by the wrists. Maybe it was discipline. Maybe they were praying.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR MOLLY JEAN BENNETT‘s essays, poems, and strongly worded letters have appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Atlas Obscura, Word Riot, Bustle, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and currently lives in New York City. |
