Pages for You: A Novel - Softcover

Brownrigg, Sylvia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312420048 ISBN 13: 9780312420048

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Synopsis

Winner of a 2002 Lambda Literary Award

In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The seventeen-year-old, new to evrything around her―college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life―is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her. When Flannery finds herself enrolled in a class with remote, brilliant older woman, she is intimidated at first, but gradually becomes Anne Arden's student―Baudelaire, lipstick colors, or how to travel with a lover―Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.

About this title

About the Author:

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of the novel The Metaphysical Touch, and a collection of short stories, Ten Women Who Shook the World―both published by Picador. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Pages For You
PART ONE  
 
The leaves were confettied brightly over the sidewalk as if a parade had just passed, and Flannery did not think she had ever in her life seen such colors. They would get deeper and more heartfelt, she knew, with warm oranges and pomegranate reds, and she could hardly wait for the experience. Like every other sensation, that sight was still before her. But already they were goldenrod and butternut on the ground, and up in the trees (she looked skyward) infinite greens, all the apple and lime and melon flesh she could imagine. They were so beautiful she wanted to eat them or breathe them, take them inside her, make them part of herself. At the very least, she wanted to not ever forget them. She told her memory to hold on to them; there might come a time later when she would need their solace. She came from a place where autumn meant oncoming dampness and fog, the new drawl of the school year: a plain, dull gravity of shoulders and hope. Nothing like this fierceness of light and the brisk bite of cold on the cheek, which seemed playful, a love nip, rather than a somber slap of warning that winter might come. She was not yet wary of the winters here, having not moved through one. She knew this approaching splendor meant death and decay, the boding of ice-prisoned branches and slippery black streets, butcould not make herself feel the grief in it. All this vividness she could read only as exhilaration. Not melancholy. Flannery abandoned herself to movie clichés of the East she'd learned as a girl in the West. She kicked her tennis-shoed feet through the leaves. She buried her hands in the pockets of her coat, which had a serious weight she was not used to. She knew that this lift of fall glory, which brought her to a shocking peak of happiness--from where, suddenly, she had a complete panoramic view; could see the shape of her future, the blank scope of her forthcoming cities and days--she knew that she would never again reach such a height of pure, sensual pleasure. Never again in her life. She was seventeen. She had no idea about anything, really. And she was about to meet someone--literally, around the next corner. Within that person, a new and altogether unsuspected happiness waited. Copyright © 2001 by Sylvia Brownrigg

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312420048
• ISBN 13: 9780312420048
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272