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THE CRITICS HAIL BEAUTIFUL BODIESAuthor of A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY and SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS "WONDERFULLY
ENTERTAINING...AND WISE. .
SMOTHER
HER IN KISSES
--
"Impossible to put down and enornously entertaining..." Booklist.
"BRILLIANT FEMALE PORTRAITS"...Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce
"URBAN THIRTYSOMETHINGS DISSECTED WITH WISDOM, LITERARY SKILL, HUMANITY AND KNOWING HUMOR. More , please." *starred Kirkus.
"WITTY AND FUNNY SOCIAL COMEDY CARRIES THE RING OF TRUTH." Publishers Weekly.
"I
inhaled this book in 48 hours flat, impatient with meals, husband, sleep,
work, and anything that came between me and it.
If you are looking to be absorbed and diverted, you couldn't do
better....It's quite amazing, in fact, how much suspense Cunningham
generates around these six women...Part of the tension is generated by the
city itself; the traffic;the apartment problems;the flashers and drug
dealers and men who press up against you on the subway. ...Cunningham is
very good at evoking the way urban minds jitter and teeter and sneak and
weave like a bike in midtown, Big Life Questions sharing brain space with
the stressful logistics of daily life.
Perhaps its closest relative is Mary McCarthy's THE GROUP, another
novel of women's friendship."
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Critically acclaimed author Laura Shaine Cunningham is known for her memoirs Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country, that “read like novels” (Anne Tyler). Now, in BEAUTIFUL BODIES, Ms. Cunningham has written a novel that reflects the wit and warmth of her non-fiction.. “Laugh all you like,” as Anne Tyler said of Ms. Cunningham’s writing, “but once you’ve finished you may find yourself sitting very quietly, mulling over the marvels...” It’s been a while since “an all female novel” rose to the wit of the classics penned by Dorothy Parker or Mary McCarthy...but Cunningham, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker magazine and been hailed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, offers us a dazzling comedy of manners in high literary tradition. This is a smart and sizzling take on single women’s lives at the start of our uncertain twenty-first century. Inventively structured to take place in one night, BEAUTIFUL BODIES invites the reader to join the party. While a delirious debate rages over the guest of honor—Will passion or pragmatism prevail?—Everyone will identify with someone in the group—the hostess so distracted by her new love affair (How could she have forgotten sex? It had been three years, her longest intermission but still)...Lisbeth, who is so fragile, she poses for Zoloft ads, or Sue Carol, the professional wacktress (cross between a waitress and an actress) who knows she must leave her husband...tonight.... or Nina, who has taken leave for a few hours from her mother’s apartment in the Bronx, and cannot eat the chocolate soufflé cake she has baked for the occasion. Pitting Martha, the friend everyone loves to hate—a magnificent monster in an endangered species cape—against Claire, the soulful, unmarried mother-to-be whose “income is less than her phone bill”—the battle rages as the dinner guests face off on the ultimate female choices. Will the six-way friendship survive the zingers that spark across the table? BEAUTIFUL BODIES is a novel that cuts through convention but never loses heart. While the cellphones chime the eleventh hour and their biological clocks clang to rewind, the friends reinvent a timeless ritual, and perform a ceremony for the thirty-six-year-old single mother-to-be. The warmth the friends rekindle creates the radiant center of this inventive, deftly composed novel. BEAUTIFUL BODIES establishes that truth in fiction can be both effervescent and serious. As the Australian red wine flows, the author neatly carves up our new urban society. This is a sharp new look at our new urban “friends instead of family” generation that “is still young but has been young for a long time.” Washington Square Press is a division of Simon & Schuster, the publishing operation of Viacom Inc. www.simonsays.com |
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