Valeria's Last Stand: A Novel - Hardcover

Fitten, Marc

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596916206 ISBN 13: 9781596916203

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2009

Synopsis

A comic romp celebrating late-flowering love in a Hungarian village that will appeal to readers of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

Valeria is a whale in a puddle. She harrumphs her daily way through her backwater Hungarian village, finding equal fault with the new, the old, the foreign, and the familiar. Her decades of universal contempt have turned her into a touchstone of her little community―whatever she scorns the least must be the best, after all. But, on a day like any other, her spinster's heart is struck by an unlikely arrow: The village potter, long known and little noticed, captures her fancy, and Valeria finds herself suddenly cast in a role she never expected to play. This one deviation from character, this one loose thread, is all it takes for the delicately woven fabric of village life to unravel. And, for the first time in a long time, Valeria couldn't care less. With humor and sensitivity, author Marc Fitten delivers an unexpected and entirely inspiring first novel that will leave you begging for more.

About this title

Review

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Set in the fictional town of Zivatar (by all appearances, a sleepy Hungarian village of the post-Communist era that time--and capitalism--forgot), Valeria's Last Stand is full of the kind of colorful, Chaucerian characters you'd expect to find in a fable. There's Ibolya, the bawdy, hot-tempered tavern owner who taunts patrons with her ample bosom and cheap beer; a greedy, glad-handing mayor, desperate for rich foreign investors to put the town on the map; and there's even a trickster in the form of a chimney sweep, a misanthropic scoundrel who arrives just in time to bring a brewing scandal to full-tilt. At the center of it all is Valeria, a feisty spinster who thrives on her neighbors' scorn until the day she finds herself unexpectedly smitten with the local potter. Theirs is a tempestuous attraction, igniting a vicious rumor mill that reveals--with no shortage of humor or wisdom--the pride and prejudice plaguing the town. As in any fable, there's a lesson to be learned here, but there's nothing heavy-handed about it: Marc Fitten deftly warms these characters to the notion that change, though inevitable, can do them good. --Anne Bartholomew

About the Author

Marc Fitten was born in Brooklyn in 1974 to Panamanian parents. He spent much of the 1990s living and traveling in Europe, based in Hungary. He's been published in Prairie Schooner, the Louisville Review, and the Hogtown Creek Review, and has published a napkin online at Esquire. Marc is a Ph.D. student at Georgia State University and received the Paul Bowles Fellowship for Fiction. He is currently the editor of the Chattahoochee Review.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1596916206
• ISBN 13: 9781596916203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272