Margins
Discipline book cover
Discipline
A Novel
2026
First Published
4.00
Average Rating
224
Number of Pages

A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a “lit world phenom” (Harper’s Bazaar). I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. But I don’t know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow. Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his cabin, deep in the woods of Maine, what she encounters threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it. A delicately explosive high-wire act about the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive, Discipline is a terse triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

Avg Rating
4.00
Number of Ratings
62
5 STARS
32%
4 STARS
42%
3 STARS
19%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Larissa Pham
Author · 4 books
Larissa Pham is a writer living in Brooklyn. She has written for Adult, Guernica, The Nation and Nerve. Pham studied painting and art history at Yale University.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved