Green Girl: A Novel (P.S.) - Softcover

Zambreno, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062322834 ISBN 13: 9780062322838

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2014

Synopsis

With the fierce emotional and intellectual power of such classics as Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, Kate Zambreno's novel Green Girl is a provocative, sharply etched portrait of a young woman navigating the spectrum between anomie and epiphany.

First published in 2011 in a small press edition, Green Girl was named one of the best books of the year by critics including Dennis Cooper and Roxane Gay. In Bookforum, James Greer called it "ambitious in a way few works of fiction are." This summer it is being republished in an all-new Harper Perennial trade paperback, significantly revised by the author, and including an extensive P.S. section including never before published outtakes, an interview with the author, and a new essay by Zambreno.

Zambreno's heroine, Ruth, is a young American in London, kin to Jean Seberg gamines and contemporary celebutantes, by day spritzing perfume at the department store she calls Horrids, by night trying desperately to navigate a world colored by the unwanted gaze of others and the uncertainty of her own self-regard. Ruth, the green girl, joins the canon of young people existing in that important, frightening, and exhilarating period of drift and anxiety between youth and adulthood, and her story is told through the eyes of one of the most surprising and unforgettable narrators in recent fiction—a voice at once distanced and maternal, indulgent yet blackly funny. And the result is a piercing yet humane meditation on alienation, consumerism, the city, self-awareness, and desire, by a novelist who has been compared with Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Elfriede Jelinek.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Zambreno is the author of O Fallen Angel, Green Girl, and Heroines. She is at work on a cycle of memory and history, Drifts, Switzerland, and Book of Mutter.

Review

“A major step forward for a talented and whip-smart writer.” (James Greer, BookForum)

“I can’t recall the last time I read a book whose heroine infuriated and seduced me as completely as Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl.” (Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair)

“[An] electric talent . . . a risqué darling [with] serious literary cachet.” (Gina Frangello, The Rumpus)

“If you were ever a green girl, you will recognize yourself on page after page.” (Lightsey Darst, Bookslut)

“It cracks, it zings. It makes you call your girlfriend and read sections aloud over the phone.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“The best word to describe Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl is searing. . . A novel about a young woman who is learning how to perform her femininity, who is learning the power of it, the fragility of it.” (Roxane Gay, Bookslut)

“Brilliant. . . This is a book I could see savored by both a teen finding great solace in, and by someone like myself, who probably could not be more removed from the lifestyle of its matter.” (Blake Butler, HTMLGiant)

“Kate Zambreno writes with the clear eyes and steady hand of a vérité filmmaker.” (Pamela Lu)

“Zambreno’s Ruth is literature’s lost girl. . . A harrowing, brilliant book.” (Kate Durbin)

“Not since Faulkner first arrested my heart and stole my breath in The Sound and the Fury have I been as ravaged by the language of a novel as in Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl.” (Lidia Yuknavitch)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0062322834
• ISBN 13: 9780062322838
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304