Demons & Divas: Three Novels - Hardcover

Molinaro, Ursule

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0929701593 ISBN 13: 9780929701592

Publisher: McPherson, 1999

Synopsis

For this trilogy of short novels--her first new book in six years--Ursule Molinaro drew upon a wealth of sources (including Balzac, Flaubert, and Hildegard of Bingen) to transform the grotesqueries of our time into timeless tales.

Angel on Fire presents Clara Corvo, who was born with three peculiarities--a cloven hoof, phenomenal intelligence, and clairvoyance. Her mother finds her unbearable, and to escape her family takes a young student as a lover. When six-year-old Clara matriculates at Harvard Law School, an almost classical conclusion is inevitable.

In twenty letters gathered for the pending canonization of Jacob Erskine Wooster, a picture emerges not of humility but of large contraditions in an ordinary man whose beatification is as strange as his life. Saint Boy is Diane Arbus in prose.

In April in Paris, Molinaro spins Southern gothic into French embroidery. An American woman out of her element wherever she happens to be.

About this title

About the Author:

Ursule Molinaro authored more than a dozen novels, two dozen widely produced one-act plays, three volumes of non-fiction, and over one hundred short stories. Her novels and stories have been published also in England, France, and Japan. She was a self-trained artist (her paintings and collages appear on her McPherson titles), and avid acrosticist. Ursule Molinaro died in New York City on July 12, 2000. Ursule Molinaro's correspondence includes letters from Marguerite Yourcenar, W. H. Auden, Raja Rao, Henri M. Peyre, Leon Kelly, Gunter Grass, Altert Camus, John Dos Passos, Marianne Moore, Anais Nin, Robert Cordier, and Edith Piaf. Recipient of awards and fellowships from the McDowell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the PEN American Center, Ms. Molinaro also translated from four languages, including notable works by Hermann Hesse, Dino Buzzati, Nathalie Sarraute, Phillipe Sollers, Uwe Johnson, Reinhard Lettau, Audiberti, Gunter Eich, Edith Bruck, Claude Ollier, Bertolt Brecht, Francois Mauriac, Jean Vautier, Jean-Paul Weber, Walter Hollerer, Vincenzo Accame, Paolo Carra, Edward Albee (into French), and films by Jean Luc-Godard and Agnes Varda. During her lifetime, Ursule Molinaro's poems and short stories appeared in a wide variety of magazines, including Quixote, Chelsea Review (of which she was a founding editor), Noonday, Provincetown Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Cosmopolitan, Swank, La Fiera Litteraria, Harlequin, Western Humanities Review, Minnesota Review, Les Lettres Nouvelles, Lotus, Extensions, Works, Bachelor, Panache, Carolina Quarterly, Midstream, Oyez, Triquarterly, New Letters, The Little Magazine, NAR, and Formations.

From Publishers Weekly:

This compact & carefully constructed trilogy of short novels -- Angel on Fire, Saint Boy and April in Paris -- focuses on seemingly ordinary characters, viewing them through a screen of mythological and biblical symbols and endowing them with double identities. In Angel on Fire, the Corvo family's balance is disrupted by the arrival of a seventh child and first daughter, Clara, born with a hoof in the place of one foot but also with precocious intelligence and prescience. From the moment of her birth, Clara is an emotional lightning rod. By age five, she has inspired worship and devotion in her father, brothers and her kindergarten classmates, but also jealousy and frustrated rage in women, including her own mother. In Saint Boy, Molinaro continues to question what makes a person worthy of admiration, or in the extreme case she documents, what makes a saint. Reading through a dramatic and passionate series of letters from those who knew (or didn't know) him, the hagiographers of the beatified (but not yet canonized) Jacob Erskine Wooster must reconstruct the life of this so-called "everyday saint." In April in Paris, April Mentone n?e Winslow presents her recollections of her expatriate life in Europe, but April's tenuous grasp on reality gives her a confused memory of her American past. Transporting her characters from Sicily to New York to Athens, from Sioux Falls to Los Angeles to Greece, and from Richmond to Vienna to Paris, Molinaro communicates a sense of displacement and manages to cover vast stretches of time and space. Translator, playwright, and author of 13 novels (Fat Skeleton, etc.), Molinaro reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary, injecting elements of the fantastic into her curious modern fables. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: McPherson
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0929701593
• ISBN 13: 9780929701592
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 239