Nine Island
Published on 13. September 2016
244 pages
978-1-936787-27-2 (ISBN)
Description
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016 "Nine Island is a crackling incantation, brittle and brilliant and hot and sad and full of sideways humor that devastates and illuminates all at once." -Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
Nine Island is an intimate autobiographical novel, told by J, a woman who lives in a glass tower on one of Miami Beach's lush Venetian Islands. After decades of disaster with men, she is trying to decide whether to withdraw forever from romantic love. Having just returned to Miami from a monthlong reunion with an old flame, "Sir Gold,” and a visit to her fragile mother, J begins translating Ovid's magical stories about the transformations caused by Eros. "A woman who wants, a man who wants nothing. These two have stalked the world for thousands of years,” she thinks. When not ruminating over her sexual past and current fantasies, in the company of only her aging cat, J observes the comic, sometimes steamy goings-on among her faded-glamour condo neighbors. One of them, a caring nurse, befriends her, eventually offering the opinion that "if you retire from love . . . then you retire from life.”More details
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Person
Jane Alison is the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes, and three novels?The Love?Artist, The Marriage of the Sea, and Natives and Exotics?and the translator of Ovid's stories of sexual transformation, Change Me. She is Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville. Learn more at janealison.com.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
