Black Market Babies - Softcover
...the kind of nightmare literary thrillseekers love.... Recalling the adventure stories of Kathy Acker and the dystopian California vision of Nathanael West, Black Market Babies creates its own world from our thoroughly modern anxieties about family, sex and self. It is a dreamscape emanating from your television screen with the scan button going wild.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
Black Market Babies gives new meaning to the phrase family reunion. In Claire Phillips's provocative novella, three young women meet on their first day at college and promptly discover that they're sisters--and that they were quite literally separated at birth. A telltale scar on each of their little fingers indicates where the delivery-room sundering took place:
From the Publisher:
They were cut apart by a very clever doctor, who did not waste any time trying to salvage the finger for one child's use. Chop, chop, and each babe was sent on her individual way. If it weren't for the governor's cuts in public education they never would have met.Not surprisingly, Heather, Lavender, and Iris are horrified. Who has the real parents? How were the trio apportioned to various families? Phillips proceeds to take us on a twisting tale of discovery, which makes the beginning of the novella seem almost mundane. Over and over she shifts perspective--at times we seem to be watching a television documentary about the parents, or sharing a car ride with an unidentified sleuth, or occupying the mind of a college professor who's taken one of the trio under her wing. This postmodernist romp can get a little confusing, like a David Lynch movie with all the narrative tissue snipped out. But Black Market Babies remains a surreal, entertaining slice of life--at least the way it's lived in late-20th-century California. --Cindy Cunningham
In this darkly dazzling satire, Iris, Heather and Lavender are thrust into notoriety when they discover they are triplets separated at birth. The three young women attempt to fulfill what they believe is their destiny by starting a new life together, but too many questions riddle their existences.
Who are these black market babies, and who is their mother? In a wild ride criss-crossing California, some unusual suspects turn up. Could their mother be Madame Thistle-Brun, the charismatic sociology professor who manipulates the triplets and the media? Or is it Dinah Decimal, the fierce madwoman who possesses elemental strength as well as a tractor which she uses on an unforgettable search-and-destroy mission?
By turns hilarious, edgy, and heart rending, Black Market Babies explores the love between mother and child, the havoc it wreaks, and how we survive it. Black Market Babies also introduces an exciting new voice in fiction, Claire Phillips, whose writing goes from the linear to the spectacular in gorgeous leaps of imagination.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- Publisher11th Hour
- Publication date1998
- ISBN 10 0966448804
- ISBN 13 9780966448801
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages180
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