Prose

2021 · 9780063012141-2025 — Harper 2021. Hardcover. New/New. <p><strong>Author:</strong> Francine Prose</p><p><strong>Publisher:</strong> Harper</p><p><strong>Binding:</strong> Hardcover</p><p><strong>ISBN:</strong> 9780063012141</p><p><strong>Release Date:</strong> 2021</p><p><strong>Number Of Pages:</strong> 336</p><p><strong>Details:</strong> Named one of the best books of 2021 by NPR The Washington Post and Financial Times“No one states problems more correctly more astutely more amusingly and more uncomfortably than Francine Prose . . . The gift of her work to a reader is to create for us what she creates for her protagonist: the subtle unfolding the moment-by-moment process of discovery as we read and change from not knowing and even not wanting to know or care to seeing what we had not seen and finding our way to the light of the ending.â€â€”Amy Bloom New York Times Book Review"Depending on the light it’s either a very funny serious story or a very serious funny story. But no matter how you turn it The Vixen offers an illuminating reflection on the slippery nature of truth in America then and now."—Washington PostCritically acclaimed bestselling author Francine Prose returns with a dazzling new novel set in the glamorous world of 1950s New York publishing the story of a young man tasked with editing a steamy bodice-ripper based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—an assignment that will reveal the true cost of entering that seductive dangerous new world. It’s 1953 and Simon Putnam a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches exclusive literary parties and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits a far cry from his loving middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island.But Simon’s first assignment—editing The Vixen the Patriot and the Fanatic a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg a potboiler intended to shore up the firm’s failing finances—makes him question the cost of admission. Because Simon has a secret that at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg’s. His parents mourn Ethel’s death.Simon’s dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen’s author the startlingly beautiful reckless seductive Anya Partridge ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. As mysteries deepen as the confluence of sex money politics and power spirals out of Simon’s control he must face what he’s lost by exchanging the loving safety of his middle-class Jewish parents’ Coney Island apartment for the witty whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic boss the legendary Warren Landry. Gradually Simon realizes that the people around him are not what they seem that everyone is keeping secrets that ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot—and that these crises may steer him toward a brighter future. At once domestic and political contemporary and historic funny and heartbreaking enlivened by surprising plot turns and passages from Anya’s hilariously bad novel The Vixen illuminates a period of history with eerily stri</p> Harper hardcover