The Porno Girl: and Other Stories - Hardcover

Wexler, Merin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312310579 ISBN 13: 9780312310578

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2003

Synopsis

Brazen and sharp-witted, Merin Wexler’s linked stories bind mothers, daughters, and wives wrestling with a fear of intimacy in sexual and family relationships.

These are women and teenagers caught in the pivotal conflicts of their lives, questioning and testing out their desirability, and their fitness as wives, mothers, and friends.

Merin Wexler touches a nerve, capturing longings and terrors that are both all-too-familiar and usually kept private. A new mother finds herself inexplicably drawn to the local porn shop, her baby strapped to her chest. A career mom decides to have a second child to keep her nanny. A teenaged babysitter sleeps with the dad to get closer to the mom. The glamorous proprietress of the summerhouse next door takes advantage of her infatuated teenage neighbor to suppress her feelings of estrangement from her indifferent husband. Wickedly funny and unsettling, The Porno Girl is a work of startling insight by a gifted young writer.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Advance Praise for Merin Wexler’s The Porno Girl

"The wonderful characters who inhabit The Porno Girl are both burdened and enlivened by their addiction to the guilty pleasures of life. Like the prose itself, Wexler's women are wry, bright, edgy and smart. These touching, funny stories are great antidotes for the lonely, guilty hours of three or four in the morning, when one most needs the solace and wisdom of such good company." —Antonya Nelson, author of Female Trouble

"With unusual candor, Merin Wexler deftly portrays women's struggle to navigate the complex, emotional terrain of their most intimate relationships. Wexler has a sharp eye for life's everyday paradoxes and delves into them with intelligence and compassion." —Noelle Howey, author of Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods—My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine

"Witty, sly, and above all, wise, what makes Merin Wexler's marvelous debut collection so compelling is her willingness to explore the dark eddies of her characters' emotional lives. With clear-eyed grace and a fond humor, Wexler offers the complicated and ultimately heartbreaking dilemmas of mothers conflicted about motherhood and girls who thrust themselves into sexual intimacies beyond their adolescent comprehension." —Marisa Silver, author of Babe in Paradise

About the Author:

Merin Wexler graduated from Harvard University, where she won a Knox Fellowship to Oxford University, and she earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She has been awarded the Heekin Foundation's Tara Prize for Short Fiction, among other prizes, and has won both an NEA/WritersCorps Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship. She lives in New York City where she is currently writing a novel forthcoming from St. Martin's Press.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312310579
• ISBN 13: 9780312310578
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224