Into the Valley

Ruth Galm

ISBN 10: 1616955090 / ISBN 13: 9781616955090

Published by Soho Press, 2015

About this Item

Signed by the author on the title page. First Edition, first printing (with full number line). Front bottom corner lightly bumped. Dust jacket has very slight edge wear. DJ in clear archival sleeve. 256, [9] pp. 8.5 x 5.75 inches.

Seller Inventory # 010465

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Into the Valley
• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1616955090
• ISBN 13: 9781616955090
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Ruth Galm’s spare, poetic debut novel, set in the American West of early Joan Didion, traces the drifting path of a young woman as she skirts the law and her own oppressive anxiety.

Into the Valley opens on the day in July 1967 when B. decides to pass her first counterfeit check and flee San Francisco for the Central Valley. Caught between generations and unmarried at 30, B. doesn’t understand the new counterculture youths. She likes the dresses and kid gloves of her mother’s generation, but doesn’t fit into that world either.

B. is beset by a disintegrative anxiety she calls “the carsickness,” and the only relief comes in handling illicit checks and driving endlessly through the valley. As she travels the bare, anonymous landscape, meeting an array of other characters—an alcoholic professor, a bohemian teenage girl, a criminal admirer—B.’s flight becomes that of a woman unraveling, a person lost between who she is and who she cannot yet be.

About the Author

Ruth Galm’s writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, and Joyland. Her story “New Mexico, 1957” received special mention in Best American Short Stories 2016. Galm holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been a resident of the Ucross Foundation. She was born and raised in San José, California, spent time in New York City and Boston, and now lives in San Francisco. Into the Valley is her first novel.