Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather - Softcover

Willett, Jincy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031242423X ISBN 13: 9780312424237

Publisher: Picador, 2004

Synopsis

Set in Rhode Island, Winner of the National Book Award tells the story of twins who could not be more different. Abigail Mather is a woman of passionate sensual and sexual appetites, while her sister, the book loving local librarian Dorcas, lives a quiet life of the mind. But when the sisters are sought out by the predatory and famous poet, Guy DeVilbiss, who introduces them to Hollywood hack writer and possible psychopath Conrad Lowe, they rapidly become pawns in a game that leads to betrayal, shame and ultimately, murder.
Darkly comic and satirical, Jincy Willett's Winner of the National Book Award is unnervingly funny and disarmingly tender whether she is writing about sex, literary delusion or Yankee pretension.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Willett's second book...is a brilliant black comedy starring twins with antithetical dispositions and a handsome stranger with designs on both of them. ...Poignant and funny, mean and tender, Willett's novel is exuberantly original."
- Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"The funniest novel I have read, possibly ever. Brilliant, totally original, and worthy of its title. I promise you will laugh constantly and to the point of stomach damage."
-Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors and Dry

"Audaciously titled, cleverly constructed, Winner of the National Book Award is an elegy wrapped inside a satire, a sorrowful meditation on the mysteries of sibling love and rivalry concealed within a bitterly funny chronicle of literary buffoonery. Jincy Willett is a fearless writer, capable of startling the reader into rueful laughter at every turn."
-Tom Perrotta, author of Joe College

"'A well-wrought piece of fiction,' the heroine of this novel declares, 'helps us make sense out of the chaos of our lives. Why be deliberately obscure when real life is so impossibly fractured and opaque?' Well, exactly. How rarely the knacks for wisdom and for cracking wise come in one single, satisfying package. (Also, who knew Rhode Island could be so entertaining?) So: hurrah for Jincy Willett, and for her funny, charming, humane, and altogether well-wrought piece of fiction." --Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century

About the Author:

Jincy Willett is a Rhode Island writer living in San Diego, California, and the author of the collection Jenny and the Jaws of Life, a St. Martin's Griffin paperback.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 031242423X
• ISBN 13: 9780312424237
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336