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More copies of this ISBNThe Summer without Menby Siri Hustvedt
Staff Pick
Smart, wry, engaging, and affecting, The Summer without Men is a triumph. The narrator's voice is utterly distinctive, and her mind is a joy to inhabit. A must for Hustvedt fans, and if you haven't read her before, you're missing out on one of America's best contemporary novelists. Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:"And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment."
Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia's husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a "pause." This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia's release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people's home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her — her mother and her close friends, the Five Swans, and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband — and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own. From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes. Review:"A theatrically manic poet turns heartbreak into an intellectual endeavor in Hustvedt's intellectually spry latest (after The Sorrows of an American). Fresh out of the hospital at age 55 following a breakdown brought on by her husband's departure for a young colleague referred to as 'The Pause,' award-winning poet and Columbia professor Mia Fredricksen flees Brooklyn to spend the summer in her Minnesota hometown. There she is in the company of her mother and four other feisty old ladies, the young mother next door, and the seven hormone-addled pubescent girls enrolled in her poetry class at the local arts guild. Mia sorts out her agony as only a scorned woman with a Ph.D. in comparative literature can — by pouring it through a sieve of poets, philosophers, and critical theorists. At times these references eclipse the presence of the narrator herself, but even this absence becomes the basis for philosophical rumination, as Mia corresponds online with the anonymous — and at times abusive — Mr. Nobody. Though initially trapped in a claustrophobic cerebral solitude, Mia opens up, and, in so doing, lets in some much needed air to a constricted narrative, so that instead of being another novel of a woman on the brink, this becomes an adroit take on love, men and women, and girls and women. (May)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright PWyxz LLC)
Review:“I think I am in love....This is one of the most profound and absorbing books I have read in a long time.” The Washington Post
Review:“The pages turn themselves. The old story, the search for the self, holds water once again.” Los Angeles Times
Review:“Superb...a page turner … serious but witty, large-minded and morally engaged.” The New York Times Book Review
Review:“Frequently dazzling...truly memorable.” The Sunday Times (London)
Review:“Passionate...enlightening.” The Miami Herald
Review:“Masterful.” The Times (UK)
Synopsis:"And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment." Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mias husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mias release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old peoples home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,“the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own. From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes. About the AuthorSiri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She moved to New York City in 1978 and earned her Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University in 1986. She is the author of five novels, including The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and The Blindfold, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle, and most recently The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.
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