Damian Westfall

Echoing Aeschylus's tragedy "Prometheus Bound", Damian Westfall's new novel "Bennett's Cow-Eyed Girl" is a meditation on self-destruction, creativity, regret and emotional paralysis. Set during one rainy night in a darkened cramped apartment, "Bennett's Cow-Eyed Girl" depicts the story of three characters. Murray Brater, a writer in his mid-fifties who is writing a dictionary of nonexistent words. Dell, Murray's twentysomething hapless assistant who does nothing but sleep. And Mr. Shreck, an aging novelist with a ten year case of writer's block, who dreams of writing an English epic in dactylic hexameter. Searching for self-discovery Murray finds nothing but regret. Searching for inspiration, Mr. Shreck finds nothing but plagiarism. Searching for nothing, Dell finds what could be meaning.

Using the Medea tragedies of Euripides and Seneca, Damian Westfall creates a new novel, Molly Divorced. The novel is a minimalist dialogue depicting a post-modern Medea (Now Molly), whose husband, Jack, abandons her for a younger woman. Betrayed, wounded, and brimming with hate she sacrifices her love for her children and kills them because she knows that this will cause the deepest pain to her ex-husband. Westfall's debut novel, Molly Divorced, is a concise example of narrative language pared down to the minimum essentials. Standing on the shoulders of Beckett and Carver, Damian Westfall has reinvented the Medea myth in this new groundbreaking novel.