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[Reviewlet] A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends, by Stacy Bierlein

Lauren Hall — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:00:12 +0000

The characters in Stacy Bierlein’s debut collection, A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends, are all smart, strong women. They have good jobs, good friends, and full lives. The world is theirs for the conquering—if only they weren’t continually waylaid by their abysmal taste in men.

Sound familiar? In a post-Sex and the City era, much of Bierlein’s literary ground feels well-trod. We’ve come to expect the cheeky sex talk, the blasé infidelity, and – above all – the redemptive power of female friendship. We’re no longer shocked when a woman who seemingly has it all considers throwing it away for a man who doesn’t deserve her. And the remaining storylines are equally predictable: a grieving woman finds solace in a European lover; a wife battles her mother-in-law for her husband’s attention; friends from college gather to celebrate an engagement and marvel at their varying life paths. Although Bierlein’s prose is cleanly delivered and snappily paced, her collection too often tells us stories we’ve heard before.

Which is a shame, because the glimpses we catch of Bierlein’s originality take us beyond the tropes of chick lit to someplace magical. In the opening story, “A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends,” two girlfriends head off on a vacation to Nantucket, only to find themselves instead on an island inhabited by every man they’ve ever dated, lined up in chronological order. It’s a fantastic premise, and Bierlein heightens the payoff by juxtaposing the impossible scenario with unassuming, economical prose: “In three days we have played, cried, ran, fought, laughed, danced, and built fires with them all —every man we’ve ever wanted. We’re exhausted.”

Similarly, the final story in the collection, “An Interrogation at the Prison of Ex-Girlfriends,” gives us a roomful of mistresses tied up for questioning by an angry wife and her whip-cracking assistant. Like, “A Vacation…,” there’s a suspension of disbelief required here, and a sense of time-out-of-time. Our narrator ponders

If this had happened when we were together I would have told him, Your biggest problem right now is that I sort of like her. Certainly undertaking a group abduction requires more verve that I had ever imagined from a wife.

In Bierlein’s world, revenge is a dish that tastes even better with a little self-deprecating humor.

With these two stories, Bierlein demonstrates exactly how much verve she’s capable of delivering. Here’s hoping her next collection will serve up even more.

Extras

Read Bierlein’s writings, including a self-interview, at The Nervous Breakdown.
Listen to a podcast of Bierlein’s AWP conference panel, in which she offers advice to emerging writers.

[Reviewlet] An Unexpected Guest, by Anne Korkeakivi

Erika Dreifus — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:00:04 +0000

Can’t make it to Paris this spring? Don’t worry. All you must do is pick up Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel, An Unexpected Guest (Little, Brown), and you’ll be in for some delicious armchair travel.

If you have read Mrs. Dalloway (and what self-respecting fiction writer or fiction lover hasn’t?), you will likely recognize some similarities between An Unexpected Guest and Virginia Woolf’s famous novel even without the benefit of the jacket copy’s reminder. In fact, Korkeakivi’s novel could just as easily have been titled Mrs. Moorhouse (or perhaps Madame Moorhouse). Like Clarissa Dalloway, Clare Moorhouse spends the single day in which the novel unspools preparing for and hosting a dinner party. She’s quite fond of flowers, too.

Madame Moorhouse is the American-born wife of a high-ranking British diplomat based in Paris. We learn quickly that her husband desires a plum appointment to Dublin, and that this prize may well be in reach—if the evening’s dinner party proceeds smoothly. But her Irish ancestry notwithstanding (Madame Moorhouse was née Clare Siobhan Fennelly), our protagonist has reasons to worry about a transfer to Dublin. Those reasons—and a ghostly presence from her past—haunt her as she goes about her day in Paris.

An Unexpected Guest transpires in a rarefied world, and that may distance some readers. If scenes that unfold in gourmet supermarkets and museum gardens don’t appeal to you, this book might not either. I’m a Francophile, so the frequent inclusion of French dialogue pleases me. But, as I learned back as an MFA student, there are those who believe that “people who use ‘foreign’ words in their fiction are just showing off.” Again, if that’s your disposition, you might choose to steer clear of this book.

Which would be too bad, because you’d miss a satisfying reading experience and the chance to consider anew the ways in which earlier literature can influence new writerly generations. And, of course, you’d be missing an inexpensive, luggage- and logistics-free trip to Paris.

Extras

Preview (and, if you like, purchase) Korkeakivi’s “Folding Paper,” an Atlantic Fiction for Kindle offering.
If you haven’t (gasp) read Mrs. Dalloway, Project Gutenberg will make things right.
If you’ll be in Paris anytime soon—or if you simply wish to imagine what your literary life might be like there—you’ll find Laurel Zuckerman’s Paris Writers News posts and updates most valuable.

[Reviewlet] The Book of Madness and Cures, by Regina O’Melveny

Lauren Hall — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:00:15 +0000

Regina O’Melveny credits many inspirations for her debut novel, The Book of Madness and Cures: Paintings by Bernardino Campi and Vittore Carpaccio; an engraving of the human anatomy by Andreas Vesalius; Dante’s Divine Comedy; the antiquarian market of Campo San Maurizio; and Homer’s Hymn to Demeter, among others. No doubt they fueled the author’s imagination—one feels their echoes throughout. However, one name seems to be conspicuously absent from O’Melveny’s list: William Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s greatest riffs play out within O’Melveny’s story. A perilous journey. A woman disguised in men’s clothing. A pair of quip-tossing peasants. Love won and lost. A great man’s decent into madness. A daughter’s enduring loyalty. Letters that lose their way. For those who love the Bard, O’Melveny’s rich and adventurous tale will evoke some welcome associations. Like Shakespeare, O’Melveny reaches high and wide for an epic story. Enter Gabriella Mondini, a female (gasp!) physician in 16th century Venice. When her father disappears, taking his vast medical knowledge – and professional patronage – with him, Gabriella becomes obsessed with his safe return. She embarks on a dangerous journey that takes her through Renaissance Europe and eventually to Morocco, with only her wits, trusted servants, and father’s cryptic letters to guide her. Threaded through the story is a book within a book, as Gabriella works to complete the final entries in a medical encyclopedia, The Book of Diseases, her father’s life work. O’Melveny often employs entries as a mirroring device for plot; thus, Gabriella moves from an entry on “Melancholia” to “Notes Toward Manifestations of Solar Madness, Correlative to Lunacy.” As a framework, The Book of Diseases makes logical sense. However, these medical case studies often feel extraneous, as they don’t often advance the story or reveal character. And further character development would have been welcome. As Gabriella travels, dozens of new faces and names join the story. After the first few countries, it becomes difficult to sort one physician from another. The prose, especially the dialogue, is partly to blame. Characters frequently alternate between overwritten, stilted language (presumably indicative of time period) and casual, contemporary conversation—sometimes within a paragraph. This inconsistency jars the ear, and does a disservice to the narrative, not to mention the characters. Without unique voices, they stand in for ideas, not human beings. What does feel authentic is the world they inhabit. O’Melveny’s vast knowledge shows, and many Renaissance details feel tangible and true. This is a journey story, after all, and O’Melveny keeps the reader hand in hand with Gabriella as she explores unfamiliar landscapes. A voyage tale should allow armchair travel, and this one does. We explore the Schwarzwald, where the braches blow “like skirts trailing across an immense Persian carpet,” brave the wind in Leiden, where it “advance[s] windmill by windmill … setting up a slow shudder,” and jostle via caravan to Taradante, with “the camels snorting, belching and grunting like dyspeptic old men.” These luxurious details bring Gabriella’s story – and O’Melveny’s prose – to life.

Extra

Check out the book trailer for The Book of Madness and Cures below:

[Reviewlet] Trophy, by Michael Griffith

Brian Short — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:00:36 +0000

Michael Griffith’s funny, infectious novel Trophy (TriQuarterly) follows Vada, a once promising college student who, after losing his parents in a car accident, drops out of school and never again does anything productive. Meanwhile, Vada’s friend and rival Wyatt becomes a top earner on the Asian golf circuit, gets hailed as a hero for stopping a grapefruit knife-wielding assailant (Wyatt mostly saved the knife-wielder from himself, it turns out), and becomes engaged to the local weather woman, Darla, whom Vada promptly falls for and who treats him like her best girlfriend. Vada makes a plan to tell Darla about his feelings, and then he dies.

That’s the whole point, really, of the book, following as it does the last twenty minutes of Vada’s life—as he finishes mowing the lawn, eats cookie dough for lunch, and suffocates under the weight of his friend Wyatt’s stuffed trophy bear. It’s a joke wrapped in a pun inside a pratfall, the gags and absurdities layering and corkscrewing until you don’t know which way is up.

But Griffith’s novel is more than a series of jokes or comic set pieces. The narrator both claims that Vada is telling the story—he attributes specific words to Vada, claims Vada lied in the previous chapter, etc.—and refers consistently to Vada in the third person, which together make the novel seem less about a (mostly!) pathetic character dying and more about the pieces of each of us which come across as pitiful, unsuccessful, unrealized, incomplete. Vada describes himself as “a hard case, only not in the unreformable-criminal way…but for crimes of excessive interiority and fear.” It’s Social Anxiety Disorder as a metaphysical state, and Griffith deftly connects this human moment to the acts of writing and reading and also, more universally, to our relationship with mortality. Griffith’s fearless narrative gearshifting and his funny, nuanced portrait of grief give the book a degree of subtlety which makes Vada’s story moving and satisfying in ways that less ambitious comic novels can’t hope to achieve.

Extras

Steve Almond recently interviewed Griffith for the Nervous Breakdown, and here’s another interview from Cincinnati’s City Beat.
On the NEA’s website, read an excerpt from Bibliophilia, one of Griffith’s previous novels.

[Reviewlet] badbadbad, by Jesús Ángel García

Tyler McMahon — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:00:18 +0000

Jesús Ángel García (JAG) is both author and narrator of the debut novel badbadbad (New Pulp Press). Telling his story to a younger brother facing combat overseas, JAG complains of a heartless ex-wife who prevents him from visiting his young son. By day, JAG works as Webmaster for a charismatic Reverend and his conservative Southern church. By night, he raises hell with the Reverend’s wayward son Cyrus. While JAG excels at both tasks, Cyrus ultimately proves more persuasive.

Their escapades start off as relatively good clean fun: late nights, bars, bourbon, drugs, pickup trucks, guns, and lots of music. But things change once JAG is introduced to fallenangels—an online network for singles with extreme desires. What starts off as a tongue-in-cheek diversion quickly blossoms into full-blown obsession, and then a kind of spiritual mission. Operating under a series of screen names, JAG becomes convinced that he can offer some brand of sexual redemption to the women of fallenangels.

Soon, JAG has a hard time keeping track of all his online “friends.” The site crashes; he jeopardizes his church job in order to keep fallenangels alive. His overlapping online identities compete for control of his psyche. Cyrus and other flesh-and-blood friends disappear. The reverend turns attention toward political influence. JAG’s hopes for a life with his son look more and more unlikely. In the book’s final chapters, JAG crosses the line into violence and desperation.

This novel is exceedingly good at what it does. Few writers in García’s peerage could pull so many raunchy sex scenes so artfully. The narrator’s eclectic love of music is palpable and endearing. Much of the novel handles both sides of rural America’s cultural divide—reverend included—with balance and empathy. Cyrus—ostensibly a sidekick and minor character—is a beautifully rendered 21^st century Southerner. In fact, I’d argue that one of this novel’s greater triumphs is its refreshing vision of Dixie: finally, a piece of fiction that frees the South from those same tired, gothic tropes—what Barry Hannah called “the canned dream of the South…a lot of porches and banjos.” While it’s true that the Klan still marches through the streets in badbadbad, it must compete with a Gay Pride Parade across town.

badbadbad is not without its problems. The narrator’s brother and son are both characters whose promise doesn’t fully pay off. And though it’s well executed, there’s a lot of on-screen messaging—which, while it may be true to life, tends to grow tedious on the page. Most unfortunately, the exact nature of JAG’s mission on fallenangels is never fully fleshed out; it never seems to be about salvation so much as getting laid.

Still, this book is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. García’s prose and imagery are well rendered and perfectly matched to his subject. Many of his scenes would turn zany and cartoonish in the hands of a lesser writer; his gift is the ability to describe excess with craft and heart. Totally fearless in its treatment of religion, race, sex, and rural America, badbadbad breathes fresh air into what sometimes feels like a stuffy literary landscape.

Extras

Read the first three chapters of badbadbad.
Here’s an interview with Jesús Ángel García at The Nervous Breakdown, where he was a Featured Author in July 2011.
Below, watch FEAR, Part I of a five-part badbadbad documentary (also edited by García) featuring interviews with his readers from across the U.S. You can also listen to a six-song sampler from the badbadbad soundtrack, or check out the book’s chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

[Reviewlet] Assumption, by Percival Everett

Cam Terwilliger — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:00:13 +0000

Percival Everett’s Assumption (Graywolf, 2011) is a collection of three mystery novellas centering on Deputy Ogden Walker, an ex-military police officer of mixed race, who now works as a deputy in the “hick-full, redneck county” of Plata, New Mexico. Due to its episodic structure, reading Assumption feels a bit like reading an entire mystery series in one sitting. Each novella poses a new murder (or series of murders) for Ogden to unravel with the help (or antagonism) of the rest of the provincial officers at the sheriff’s department. In the first section, Ogden searches for the killer of an old woman he’s known for years, one who always disliked him for being black. In the second, Ogden must save a prostitute who has run afoul of her dealer. The last depicts Ogden clearing his name after a New Mexico game warden accuses him of murder.

Everett’s prose does not aim at flowery. In fact, the only elevated passages deal with Walker’s one passion outside his job—fly fishing the mountain streams of his jurisdiction. The straightforward, dialogue-heavy style of Assumption creates a cinematic feeling, allowing for a quick read. This refusal to editorialize allows the author to depict the West’s underclass without judgment or condescension. Prostitutes, meth addicts, hayseed bigots—the people Ogden must deal with—typically antagonize him for being black, yet the deadpan narration conveys their straitened lives with empathy.

To Everett’s credit, these novellas stretch the mystery genre’s formula. Some of the series’ strongest moments are Ogden’s many conversations with his mother, a woman constantly fretting over her son, always foisting food on him. These tender scenes take what could have been a familiar, hard-bitten protagonist and push him into surprising, real, and—at times—humorous territory. For example, in my favorite exchange, Ogden’s mother needles him for developing a crush on the daughter of one of the murder victims.

If the first two novellas take an expansive view of what a mystery can be, the final installment aims to subvert it outright. Specifically, a shift in point of view promptly throws everything that comes before into question. I won’t spoil the twist, but once you close the cover of Assumption you can’t help but feel that the book has flown in the face of convention. Rather than neatly solving its final puzzle, Assumption leaves us more mystified than ever, wondering if there can ever be such a thing as “case closed.”

Extra

Listen to “The Appropriation of Cultures,” an Everett story that deals with race and class tensions in a bar full of drunk frat boys, and a nineteen-forty Martin guitar with a Barkus-Berry pickup. It’s read here for Selected Shorts by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

[Reviewlet] The Artist of Disappearance, by Anita Desai

Lee Thomas — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:00:36 +0000

Until recently, we have lived in an age of exceptionalism. Idols and Stars and the Talented, voted into fame by a nation of cell-wielding aspirants. But the tide has shifted. Ninety-nine percent no longer indicates certainty, but the righteous anger of the unexceptional. Anita Desai’s latest book, The Artist of Disappearance, a slender volume of three even slenderer novellas, makes a study of the nobody. With cool focus on the individual moment of crisis, Desai banishes the 1%, forcing us to consider all those unknown toilers. Life’s castaways.

It feels like the prerogative of an author with a career as long as Desai’s to take up the bureaucrat’s lament or the translator’s brief flowering. The novellas take place in the India of our time. The first story, “The Museum of Final Journeys,” has a whiff of Lovecraft; one keeps waiting for eerie tone to resolve into fleshly monster as a lonely bureaucrat wanders the rooms of an abandoned private museum, led by a caretaker as cryptic as any Poe imagined.

All three novellas contain these spidery characters, spinning webs from the slender stuff of lonely lives. The middle story features a translator plucked from obscurity, only to overstep her lucky break. Desai feels keenly aware of the Millennial generation’s yen for greatness, something to set the individual apart from the muddied masses. Of course, such longings are as common and ancient as the species.

In the title story, a hermit builds a secret bower, a beauty meant for himself alone. When strangers stumble upon it, he feels “Their gaze alone was a desecration.” Herein lies the tension of The Artist of Disappearance: does something only exist with an audience? Or does a witness spoil something noble? Desai plays coy; her most powerful moments are the hidden, unseen graces of her misfits, but here we are–reading a book that lays them bare.

Extra:

Listen to Anita Desai discuss her Booker-shortlisted novel Fasting, Feasting on the BBC’s World Book Club.

[Reviewlet] In Caddis Wood, by Mary François Rockcastle

Anne Barnhill — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:00:15 +0000

While reading In Caddis Wood (Graywolf), Mary François Rockcastle’s second novel, I was immediately struck by its resemblance to Wallace Stegner’s masterful Crossing to Safety. Both books examine long-term relationships and the problems of growing older. Both pay homage to the importance of place, in this case, a summer home in the woods of Wisconsin, in securing the characters, and both display a solemn, awed regard for the natural world. Like Stegner, Rockcastle deftly describes this circumscribed world. Her regard for the beauties and ambiguities of nature breathe life into Caddis Wood.

A domestic drama of the first rate, In Caddis Wood is the story of Hallie and Carl Fens and how they face Carl’s terminal illness. The reader gets an intimate view on the Fens’s marriage, family and the attendant entanglements of romance, professional ambition, the inevitable stresses and strains of life. The Fens and their twin girls struggle to understand one another. The daughters grapple with Carl’s workaholic nature, which often diverted attention from them. Through such understanding, these family members learn to forgive one another for the hurts inflicted over the years, intentional or not.

In Caddis Wood unfolds in third-person with chapters alternating between the perspective of husband and wife. This choice allows the reader to know each character more intimately, richly describing their marriage. And, since one of the characters is unwell, this call and response steadies the boat of the narrative.

Though the themes – age, disease, death – are heavy, Rockcastle’s prose, while not as precise and succinct as Stegner’s, still carries a lyrical quality.

It is midafternoon and the snow is still falling–thick, papery flakes that paint the air with dots. The ground has been rising steadily; the new snow swallows the paths Carl shoveled only this morning. Slowly, he peels an orange, arranges the cool, fragrant pieces in a meandering line along the window ledge. It is an old habit. Not that he does it on purpose to annoy Hallie. He simply loves the sensuality of the fruit, its smell and taste and texture, the act of placing the peel in that particular place beside the glass.

Here, Rockcastle layers the past upon the present with the sure guide of Carl’s habit. Not only does the reader gain intimacy with these characters, they are profoundly known by each other.

In tone, both books convey the poignancy of aging, the slow disintegration of the body that ends in death. Nostalgia and sentimentality, familiar to any writer who takes up mortality as a subject, enrich the book. These emotions, often maligned, comprise human experience, and if genuinely rendered can be quite moving.

One minor quibble: at the outset, supporting characters are introduced quickly and keeping those characters and relationships straight took work. These characters are important: this book is about more than husband and wife; but the way a marriage becomes enmeshed in kin and kindred. But that hardly detracts from this sensitive, clear-eyed portrayal of a union that has lasted more than thirty years – the joys, healed-over wounds, and love that endure in spite, perhaps because, of the ambitions and secrets that have threatened along the way.

Extras

Mary François Rockcastle, via author site

On maryfrancoisrockastle.com find the usual goods + background on the Pushcart Prize-winning literary journal, the Water~Stone Review, which Rockastle founded at Hamline University in 1997.
Speaking of place and the brevity of human life, Wallace Stegner’s “Wilderness Letter,” written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission of California in 1960, remains a testament to a writer’s passion for wildness – keeping our enjoyment of it out of the equation.

[Reviewlet] Up From the Blue, by Susan Henderson

Casey Tolfree — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:00:20 +0000

In Susan Henderson’s debut novel Up From the Blue, a premature labor lays bare Tillie Harris’s roots. Her husband on a business trip, alone in a new town with a houseful of boxes, Tillie calls the only person she can: her estranged, ex-military father — a man whose desire for organization and perfection both destroyed and forcibly united her family decades earlier.

Up From the Blue returns to the epicenter of the Harris family’s disaster: Washington, D.C., 1975, when Tillie – an off-kilter eight-year-old – must navigate her mother’s mental illness. Colonel Harris adopts a Greatest Generation silence about his wife’s problems. Tillie’s older brother Phil retreats into sullen dutifulness. Her mother Mara’s absence – physical, psychic – weighs heavily on the household.

Set against a backdrop of deep societal change and unrest, Henderson’s crisp prose mimics Tillie’s nimble mind. That mix of childhood inexperience with an adult knowledge carries the novel into the revisionist territory of memory.

My brother worked so hard to listen and to do what he was told, but while he knew more of what was happening than I did, he was never a part of what was happening. He was so quick to understand and cooperate that he faded into the background.

The inherent conflict between child and adult in the prose parallels Tillie’s reality where order is simply a disguise for disarray and what seems to be true, isn’t.

Henderson centers the brief glimpse of pregnant, adult Tillie on the crisis of her labor, but these pages expose the repercussions of that distant, harrowing year. In this juxtaposition, we behold Tillie’s frightening similarities to Mara, see the paths that could have been and yet aren’t —

A part of me will always be eight years old, living that last year we had Momma with us. And my story of that year always ends with our walk because that’s when there was hope. That’s when we could still choose any ending.

Henderson gives the reader an ending, the defining moment of Tillie’s childhood, that is also her beginning – that great, slow elimination of alternate versions of the self: adulthood.

Extras

Visit Susan Henderson’s website – LitPark – for more information about Up From the Blue, including author appearances, her blog, interviews and raves, and book club resources.

[Reviewlet] The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, by Caroline Preston

Gwen Glazer — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:00:23 +0000

We’ve all felt that little rush of connection or electricity or mystery—let’s call it a frisson—from standing in a dusty corner of a used bookstore, flipping through a shoebox of old photos or postcards, and finding something that seems to tell a secret story.

Caroline Preston’s fourth novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, seeks to recreate that feeling. Preston put together hundreds of pages of hand-cut photos and captions to create the story of her 18-year-old heroine, who receives her father’s Corona typewriter and a blank scrapbook from her mother as a high-school graduation present.

To assemble the materials that would make up Frankie’s life, Preston trolled antique stores and eBay for Bakelite bracelets and ticket stubs, a war medal and a flapper purse, a cigarette holder and a pair of driving glasses, bobby pins and fortune-telling cards. She put these items into a scrapbook: “over 600 pieces of 1920s vintage ephemera, and that’s a lot of stuff,” she says in an interview on her website—and then pasted typewritten text around them to create Frankie’s narrative.

The thrill of that chase is evident in her voice during the interview; it’s the voice of an excited collector, someone who figured out how to translate her passion for ephemera in general and the 1920s in particular into a work of fiction that’s part literary fiction and part graphic novel. The book jacket deems it “a novel in pictures,” but it’s really the typewritten text that forms the story of an 18-year-old girl in 1920, leaving her hometown to see the world.

Through the pages of her scrapbook, readers learn that Frankie Pratt is the smartest girl in her small New Hampshire high school. She initially passes up a scholarship to Vassar because her family can’t afford it, but a failed romance provides an unexpected avenue out of her town and off to college, Greenwich Village, and Paris, not to mention brushes with Charles Lindbergh and Ernest Hemingway.

Frankie is believable and interesting, and it’s fun to spend a few hours in her world, but the unusual format of the book becomes its most interesting character. Imagining the joy it must have brought Preston to assemble this book—the countless hours of searching, the endless eBay surprise packages, the clack of the vintage typewriter, careful cutting and pasting, rubber cement on her hands—might even be a touch more enjoyable than reading the book itself. But for those of us who want to believe that agents and publishers truly are open to novel formats and creative risk-taking, and may be willing to venture into uncharted waters (even with a tried-and-true author), The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt offers a glimmer—a frisson, maybe—of hope.

Extras

Take a look inside the full-color book and flip a few sample pages on Preston’s website. Shop for a copy at your local indie bookstore.

Listen to a 2006 NPR interview of Preston discussing her book Gatsby’s Girl.