Blueprints for Building Better Girls (Mint First Edition)

Elissa Schappell

ISBN 10: 0743276701 / ISBN 13: 9780743276702

Published by Simon & Schuster, 2011

About this Item

New York: S&S [2011]. First edition. First printing. Hardbound. NEW/NEW. A pristine unread copy. Very fine/Very fine in all respects. Smoke-free shop. Shipped in sturdy box. Purchased new and never opened. Comes with mylar dust jacket protector. 0.0.

Seller Inventory # 05-2012-175

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Blueprints for Building Better Girls (Mint First Edition)
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743276701
• ISBN 13: 9780743276702
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Elissa Schappell’s Use Me introduced us to a writer of extraordinary talent, whose “sharp, beautiful, and off-kilter debut” (Jennifer Egan) garnered critical acclaim and captivated readers. In Blueprints for Building Better Girls, her highly anticipated follow-up, she has crafted another provocative, keenly observed, and wickedly smart work of fiction that maps America’s shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day.

In these eight darkly funny linked stories, Schappell delves into the lives of an eclectic cast of archetypal female characters—from the high school slut to the good girl, the struggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child to the reluctant mother— to explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In “Monsters of the Deep,” teenage Heather struggles to balance intimacy with a bad reputation; years later in “I’m Only Going to Tell You This Once,” she must reconcile her memories of the past with her role as the mother of an adolescent son. In “The Joy of Cooking,” a phone conversation between Emily, a recovering anorexic, and her mother explores a complex bond; in “Elephant” we see Emily’s sister, Paige, finally able to voice her ambivalent feelings about motherhood to her new best friend, Charlotte. And in “Are You Comfortable?” we meet a twenty-one-year-old Charlotte cracking under the burden of a dark secret, the effects of which push Bender, a troubled college girl, to the edge in “Out of the Blue into the Black.” Weaving in and out of one another’s lives, whether connected by blood, or friendship, or necessity, these women create deep and lasting impressions. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell, with dazzling wit and poignant prose, has forever altered how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.

About the Author

Elissa Schappell is the author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls and Use Me. She is a contributing editor and the Hot Type book columnist at Vanity Fair, a former senior editor of The Paris Review, and cofounder and now editor-at-large of Tin House magazine. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.