Bigfoot Dreams (Contemporary American Fiction) - Softcover

Prose, Francine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140098372 ISBN 13: 9780140098372

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1987

Synopsis

Successfully balancing single motherhood, city life, and a job writing improbable articles for a tabloid newspaper, Vera is forced to confront her ill-defined relationship when one of her invented stories turns out to be true

About this title

About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen novels, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prose is a highly regarded critic and essayist, and has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, and she lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

You can walk into Vera Perl's Brooklyn apartment house and pick her out of a clutch of tenants: you will recognize her charged, speculative voice. She writes for a yellow rag called This Week, thinks in absurd, alliterative headlines and tailors her made-up stories to photographs taken as if by chance by her colleague Solomon. The fun begins when Solomon snaps two kids selling lemonade on a lawn in Flatbush, and Vera endows them with names and a psychiatrist father, and the water used in the lemonade with astonishing curative qualitiesall of which, except possibly the last, turns out to be true. The paper is slapped with a lawsuit, Vera is fired, her estranged husband Lowell flies in from Los Angeles for a night of love and leaves several days later with their daughter Rosalie. This gives Vera the chance, via a Cryptobiological Society meeting at the Grand Canyon, to pursue her dreams of the eponymous Bigfoot, a monster whose footprints are the size of bathtubs and whose arms shatter buildings with a single swipe. Prose's (Hungry Hearts account of these high jinks conveys every scene with psychedelic gusto, an authenticity of language and setting, and an acute sense of character. This is a lollapalooza of a novel, which keeps the reader hanging on every word and conjures believing out of make-believe.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0140098372
• ISBN 13: 9780140098372
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288