Product desciption
The Vixen Francine Prose by Francine Prose 9780063012141, 0063012146 instant download after payment.
Critically
acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose returns with a dazzling new
novel set in the glamorous world of 1950s New York publishing, the
story of a young man tasked with editing a steamy bodice-ripper based on
the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—an
assignment that will reveal the true cost of entering that seductive,
dangerous new world.
It’s 1953, and Simon Putnam, a
recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York
publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini
lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in
exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class
Jewish family in Coney Island.
But Simon’s first assignment—editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a
lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution
of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the
firm’s failing finances—makes him question the cost of admission.
Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the
McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood
friend of Ethel Rosenberg’s. His parents mourn Ethel’s death.
Simon’s dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen’s
author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge,
ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental
asylum. As mysteries deepen, as the confluence of sex, money, politics
and power spirals out of Simon’s control, he must face what he’s lost by
exchanging the loving safety of his middle-class Jewish parents’ Coney
Island apartment for the witty, whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic
boss, the legendary Warren Landry. Gradually Simon realizes that the
people around him are not what they seem, that everyone is keeping
secrets, that ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot—and that
these crises may steer him toward a brighter future.
At once
domestic and political, contemporary and historic, funny and
heartbreaking, enlivened by surprising plot turns and passages from
Anya’s hilariously bad novel, The Vixen illuminates a period of
history with eerily striking similarities to the current moment.
Meanwhile it asks timeless questions: How do we balance ambition and
conscience? What do social mobility and cultural assimilation require us
to sacrifice? How do we develop an authentic self, discover a vocation,
and learn to live with the mysteries of love, family, art, life and
loss?
