American Mermaid
A Novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR • "Sublime." —New York Times Book Review
...
...
lieferbar
versandkostenfrei
Buch (Kartoniert)
16.58 €
- Lastschrift, Kreditkarte, Paypal, Rechnung
- Kostenlose Rücksendung
Produktdetails
Produktinformationen zu „American Mermaid “
Klappentext zu „American Mermaid “
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR • "Sublime." —New York Times Book Review"Brilliantly sharp, funny, and thought-provoking, the gripping story of a woman trying to find her way in our chaotic world." —Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe
Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist, eco-warrior novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. But when Hollywood insists she convert her fierce, androgynous protagonist into to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her fictional mermaid come to life, enacting revenge against society’s limited view of what a woman can and should be?
American Mermaid follows a young woman braving the casual slights and cruel calculations of a winner-take-all society and discovering a beating heart in her own fiction: a new kind of hero who fights to keep her voice and choose her place. A hilarious story about deep things, American Mermaid asks how far we’ll go to protect the parts of ourselves that are not for sale.
Lese-Probe zu „American Mermaid “
Chapter 1The novel that I wrote begins with a woman in a wheelchair falling into the sea.
It s not a comedy. I wrote it alone in a studio apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, at a table on a rug that looked like it had been digested rather than woven. For three years I came home from teaching English to teenagers at Holy Cross, a secular public high school on Holy Cross Avenue, and wrote in an exhausted, anxious daze. I remember the night I started. I had bought a bottle of terrible wine after work. I was writing in my diary, then I was lying to my diary, then I wrote her. I saw her, I felt her: she was not a broken woman but a mermaid after all. Her fear of drowning filled me, and then, buoyed up in drunkenness, I felt my legs twitch with a long-forgotten muscle memory of swimming.
I lie on the giant white raft of my super-king bed, twenty stories up in an executive apartment that I ve rented for the summer in Los Angeles. I wasn t pretending to be an executive, and I m embarrassed at being the wrong person for it. I have nothing but spare time here, as the time-efficient pod-coffee reminds me. I have nothing to scan on the scanner. This place was cheap because it s in Century City, the uncoolest part of LA. You can see my building with others of its kind: architecturally, they are big-boned admin women in gray pantsuits. Unless I ve undergone some kind of retinal bleaching in the California sunshine, I think the wall-size windows are made of sunglasses glass, the pervert kind that dim. I feel like a pervert, that mix of irresponsible pleasure and occasional shrugging disgust. Pleasure because I left my teaching job and I have my days free, disgust because of what I m out here to do. Sometimes I push my nose against the glass wall and look down from my death-defying diving board at the unwalked pavement below, the only part of LA that could just as easily be Stamford, Connecticut. If it weren t for the chilly stream of panic in my blood that runs on a
... mehr
loop like a corporate courtyard fountain, I d forget where I was.
American Mermaid was published in December. I was a nobody--no babbling spectral internet persona, just a teacher--and I was told that I was lucky to get an advance of forty-five thousand. It seemed monumental, that sum, and I was grateful for the seventeen grand I pocketed after my agent nibbled and taxes chomped at it. Ten grand paid off my credit card debt. But even having seven thousand extra bucks was thrilling. Unallotted dollars not clothing me or housing me or drunk down inescapably on Friday at a bar three blocks from school.
I was thirty-three and even with my extra money my legs were hairy and my workplace was dirty and it was fine. Then suddenly it seemed the whole world might melt and recool in a smooth new shape.
In the spring, just a few months into the book s publication, American Mermaid appeared on the Instagram account of a professional internet presence named Stem Hollander, an athletic charmer in his midforties with floppy blond hair and ten cheeky grins, whose humpy Segway salsa dancing gets millions of likes between endorsements of fair-trade avocados and weed-lobby Democrats. After Hollander, the librarians picked it up. Then, to my surprise, some national treasure on the Today show open-throat screamed about it too early in the morning. Thanks to her it was packed up and palleted to Costco, where I ve seen it myself on a chessboard of hardbacks, a rook s jump away from Dieting for Joint Health. I did a gimmicky magazine interview where I met a male journalist my age in a leather jacket in Atlantic City at a bar with live mermaid shows. Women with big naturals, their legs bound in plastic tail fins, pretended not to need to breathe, writhing on the other side of a scratched pane while we drank rum runners as if the Garden State Parkway weren t five miles away. I cri
American Mermaid was published in December. I was a nobody--no babbling spectral internet persona, just a teacher--and I was told that I was lucky to get an advance of forty-five thousand. It seemed monumental, that sum, and I was grateful for the seventeen grand I pocketed after my agent nibbled and taxes chomped at it. Ten grand paid off my credit card debt. But even having seven thousand extra bucks was thrilling. Unallotted dollars not clothing me or housing me or drunk down inescapably on Friday at a bar three blocks from school.
I was thirty-three and even with my extra money my legs were hairy and my workplace was dirty and it was fine. Then suddenly it seemed the whole world might melt and recool in a smooth new shape.
In the spring, just a few months into the book s publication, American Mermaid appeared on the Instagram account of a professional internet presence named Stem Hollander, an athletic charmer in his midforties with floppy blond hair and ten cheeky grins, whose humpy Segway salsa dancing gets millions of likes between endorsements of fair-trade avocados and weed-lobby Democrats. After Hollander, the librarians picked it up. Then, to my surprise, some national treasure on the Today show open-throat screamed about it too early in the morning. Thanks to her it was packed up and palleted to Costco, where I ve seen it myself on a chessboard of hardbacks, a rook s jump away from Dieting for Joint Health. I did a gimmicky magazine interview where I met a male journalist my age in a leather jacket in Atlantic City at a bar with live mermaid shows. Women with big naturals, their legs bound in plastic tail fins, pretended not to need to breathe, writhing on the other side of a scratched pane while we drank rum runners as if the Garden State Parkway weren t five miles away. I cri
... weniger
Autoren-Porträt von Julia Langbein
JULIA LANGBEIN, a sketch and standup comedian for many years, holds a doctorate in Art History and is the author of a non-fiction book about comic art criticism (Laugh Lines, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022). She wrote the viral comedy blog The Bruni Digest (2003-7), which reviewed New York Times critic Frank Bruni's restaurant reviews every week and has since written about food, art and travel for Gourmet, Eater, Salon, Frieze and other publications. A native of Chicago, she lives outside of Paris with her family.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Julia Langbein
- 2023, Internationale Ausgabe, 336 Seiten, Maße: 15,9 x 23,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Doubleday
- ISBN-10: 0385550014
- ISBN-13: 9780385550017
- Erscheinungsdatum: 20.03.2023
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by LitHub"Sublime...Langbein intertwines Penny s story with chapters from her own novel, and this book-within-a-book structure allows us to mourn the gap between the novel Penny has written and the version she s told will make a good movie...Langbein s novel considers how we decide who owns a story and, far more compelling, how we know when a story succeeds."
New York Times Book Review
Let this book s gorgeous and unassuming cover draw you into one of the smartest, most hilarious books you ve ever read. Julia Langbein has crafted a perfect work of meta-fiction. . . [AMERICAN MERMAID] is so, so smart, toeing the line of the believably absurd. Langbein dazzles with her wholly original, sharply funny voice, making her a must-read author after this homerun fiction debut.
Iowa Public Radio
Wildly inventive, this book will get you thinking about artistic integrity as it elicits plenty of snarf-yourself laughs.
Real Simple
Funny, smart, and irresistible. . . [American Mermaid] is about striving for success, bearing the costs that come with it and finding your voice again even when you re the one writing the story. I laughed out loud.
GMA.com
Clever. . . Langbein has written a sincere novel about art, Hollywood, sexuality, feminism, global warming, the cultural zeitgeist and managed to do so while entertaining with a modern voice and a light touch of humor.
Chicago Review of Books
[A] hilarious novel [about] something serious: a young woman trying to have her voice heard and find her place in a world that seems bent on diminishing her. This story within a story is a shrewd, sardonic look at Hollywood movie making.
Associated Press
A funny debut that asks readers to contemplate ambition and the cost of selling out.
Zibby Mag
A comedy of wordplay. A superhero adventure. A Hollywood
... mehr
takedown. A hoot and a half. American Mermaid is all of these, and more. So witty and marvelous you won t be able to put it down. So pick it up!
Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less Is Lost
"I was hooked from the first page. American Mermaid is brilliantly sharp, funny, and thought-provoking, the gripping story of a woman trying to find her way in our chaotic world."
Madeline Miller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe and The Song of Achilles
"American Mermaid is shapeshifting novel composed of wildly divergent elements a biting Hollywood satire, a magical realist book-within-a-book, and a moody meditation on identity and selling out. It probably shouldn t work, but it succeeds brilliantly, thanks to Julia Langbein s tonal control and wicked sense of humor. This is a a debut novel of unusual ambition and scope."
Tom Perrotta, author of Tracy Flick Can't Win and Mrs. Fletcher
American Mermaid is, like a mermaid herself, a beautiful mix of two things. It is a brilliantly funny and perfectly modern satire, as well as being an elegant exploration of soulfulness, longing and belonging, and the ungovernable wildness of nature herself. I ve never read anything quite like it, and I loved it.
Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of City of Girls
"Every time I picked up this book I both laughed out loud and sighed in admiration. Deeply hilarious, delightfully strange, intricately constructed and remarkably satisfying, American Mermaid is sensational."
Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir
An absolute weirdo masterpiece. With her debut, Julia Langbein pulls off an impressive tonal tightrope walk that would send a lesser writer stumbling to the ground. American Mermaid manages to be so many things at once a zany and savage satire about Hollywood, a tale of magical realism, and an aching story about what comes after you achieve your dream, how the depths of your ambition can swallow you whole. This novel is both a pleasure to read and signals the arrival of an exciting new writer to watch.
Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl
"A salty, sleek and scheming satire, American Mermaid considers dangerous and alluring myths surrounding creative control, compromise and complicity. Told with a caricaturist s energy and dynamism, Langbein s layered narratives gleefully expose Hollywood s ritualized humiliations. Full of skewering, mischievous precision, it is a glittering, baited hook of a novel."
Eley Williams, author of The Liar's Dictionary
"Filled with wit and more than few laugh-out-loud moments...A downright delightful debut novel."
Booklist (starred review)
Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less Is Lost
"I was hooked from the first page. American Mermaid is brilliantly sharp, funny, and thought-provoking, the gripping story of a woman trying to find her way in our chaotic world."
Madeline Miller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe and The Song of Achilles
"American Mermaid is shapeshifting novel composed of wildly divergent elements a biting Hollywood satire, a magical realist book-within-a-book, and a moody meditation on identity and selling out. It probably shouldn t work, but it succeeds brilliantly, thanks to Julia Langbein s tonal control and wicked sense of humor. This is a a debut novel of unusual ambition and scope."
Tom Perrotta, author of Tracy Flick Can't Win and Mrs. Fletcher
American Mermaid is, like a mermaid herself, a beautiful mix of two things. It is a brilliantly funny and perfectly modern satire, as well as being an elegant exploration of soulfulness, longing and belonging, and the ungovernable wildness of nature herself. I ve never read anything quite like it, and I loved it.
Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of City of Girls
"Every time I picked up this book I both laughed out loud and sighed in admiration. Deeply hilarious, delightfully strange, intricately constructed and remarkably satisfying, American Mermaid is sensational."
Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir
An absolute weirdo masterpiece. With her debut, Julia Langbein pulls off an impressive tonal tightrope walk that would send a lesser writer stumbling to the ground. American Mermaid manages to be so many things at once a zany and savage satire about Hollywood, a tale of magical realism, and an aching story about what comes after you achieve your dream, how the depths of your ambition can swallow you whole. This novel is both a pleasure to read and signals the arrival of an exciting new writer to watch.
Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl
"A salty, sleek and scheming satire, American Mermaid considers dangerous and alluring myths surrounding creative control, compromise and complicity. Told with a caricaturist s energy and dynamism, Langbein s layered narratives gleefully expose Hollywood s ritualized humiliations. Full of skewering, mischievous precision, it is a glittering, baited hook of a novel."
Eley Williams, author of The Liar's Dictionary
"Filled with wit and more than few laugh-out-loud moments...A downright delightful debut novel."
Booklist (starred review)
... weniger
Kommentar zu "American Mermaid"
0 Gebrauchte Artikel zu „American Mermaid“
Zustand | Preis | Porto | Zahlung | Verkäufer | Rating |
---|
Schreiben Sie einen Kommentar zu "American Mermaid".
Kommentar verfassen