The Terrible Girls - Hardcover

Rebecca Brown

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330314793 ISBN 13: 9780330314794

Publisher: Picador, 1990

Synopsis

A thematically linked series of stories which deal in turn with human frailty, obsession, loss, betrayal and resistence. They are linked by the fact that they all undermine the traditional image of women as providers. By the author as "The Haunted House" and "The Children's Crusade".

About this title

About the Author:

Rebecca Brown is the author of a dozen books of prose including THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, THE END OF YOUTH, THE DOGS, THE TERRIBLE GIRLS (City Lights) and THE GIFTS OF THE BODY (HarperCollins). She recently co-edited, with Mary Jane Knecht, an anthology of writers' responses to work at the Frye Art Museum.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A debut collection of eight stories--by the American author of The Haunted House (1986) and The Children's Crusade--that was first published two years ago in England. These edgy, intense, and relentlessly abstract fictions are reminiscent of Brown's most obvious precursor, Djuna Barnes. Like Barnes, Brown explores the boundaries of erotic and emotional life in imagistic prose. Her neo-gothic sensibility reduces narrative to its essence and insists on the literal dimension of figurative language. When the narrator of ``Forgiveness'' promises to give her right arm for love, her lover bronzes the amputated limb. ``The Dark House'' and ``Isle of Skye'' are allegories of passion and betrayal in a world where female lovers explore each other like foreign countries, giving new meaning to the notion of wanderlust. The betrayed lover-narrator of ``Junk Mail'' searches for the secret meaning in her generic mail- -until the post delivers her lost body parts. The narrator who plays doctor in ``Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume'' extracts a heart made of candy from her faithless lover. But if love inevitably leads to dismemberment in Brown's linked stories, there can be no forgiveness or healing. Desire shrouded in secrecy--and scorned by many--results in social hypocrisy as well (``Lady Bountiful and the Underground Resistance''). In the meantime, the landscape may be devastated in ``The Ruined City,'' but this last story ends with a chilling affirmation, a literally ``resurrected heart.'' With her stainless-steel prose, Brown surgically dissects ambivalent hearts--and also those that pulse with the love that here never speaks its name. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0330314793
• ISBN 13: 9780330314794
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128