The author Lindsay Wong discusses her new novel Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies (Penguin, 2026), with Joseph Planta.
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Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies by Lindsay Wong (Penguin, 2026).
Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies |
Text of the introduction by Joseph Planta:
I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.
Lindsay Wong joins me again. She’s just published a new novel, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies. It’s often funny, as well as horrifying in some parts. The book follows Locinda Lo, an MFA dropout living in Vancouver with six roommates and zero job prospects. She’s got a heavy debt load, and at the same time has to save her grandmother and sister. She might as well be dead, and to escape life, she’s signed up to be a corpse bride, to be sold to the highest bidder. She’s got training, which we follow her through, where she’s got to prepare for being a bride in the afterlife. The book looks at the ghosts, real and imagined. We can’t escape our past and that haunts a lot of the book, especially in how Locinda and the other characters comport themselves. I’ll ask Lindsay about the book, and the world of curses that she illuminates and illustrates throughout. It’s fascinating stuff to think one could curse somebody else, and what that could mean for oneself in the present and the afterlife. The burden on women especially is something that one reads about in the book, and it’s culturally imposed as well, which makes the writing of this novel subversive as well as engaging. Lindsay Wong is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. It won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, which in full disclosure, I sat on the judging panel for. It was also longlisted for the Leacock Medal. In 2023, she published a short story collection Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality, which she first appeared on the program with, and was shortlisted for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. She’s also written a YA novel My Summer of Love and Misfortune. She holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, and an MFA in literary non-fiction from Columbia University. She teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Visit www.lindsaywongwriter.com for more. The new book is published by Penguin. We spoke one week ago, with Lindsay joining me from Toronto. Please welcome back to the Planta: On the Line program, Lindsay Wong; Professor Wong, good morning.
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