Description
The long-awaited 2nd novel from Jill Hoffman Founding Editor of Mudfish/Box Turtle Press
STONED is about Maud Diamond, a 40-year-old woman with two children who is getting a divorce. She has had a colossal disappointment (having been jilted by a famous artist) and falling in love with a poor unknown artist (Kazimir Noble) assuages the disappointment but leads to other ills. The small son leaves home to live with his father; the daughter does phone sex from their new home. “I’m the only one in this house earning any money,” she shouts. It is about starting a literary journal called Wild Leek with the new boyfriend and moving downtown, while their relationship spirals downward from her pot-smoking and his alcoholism. It is for anyone who has been in love or lost love, been married, divorced, or lonely. It is about the satisfactions and deprivations of sex and drugs.
Fiction.
”In Jill Hoffman’s irresistible STONED, the poet Maud Diamond not only indulges in reefer madness in her Beresford bathroom, but takes a much younger live-in lover, a handsome Russian (would-be-famous) artist, to the horror of her precocious children. An explosive triangle, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, brilliantly drawn with outsized characters worthy of Dickens, lavish imagery, and impeccable comedic timing. Hoffman has written a book so poignant and pleasurable, like a Crème Brûlée for the eyes, you’ll read it again and again. And yet for all its seeming decadence there is a purity here like a fawn running into the water.” – Stephanie Emily Dickinson, Razor Wire Wilderness
”This is the best book I read all year! And I don’t say it because it was written by my teacher, the great Jill Hoffman, and in the same Mudfish Writing Workshop where I wrote Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions, but because it’s truly amazing. Even though it’s 263 pages, I breezed through it, in fact every day I was looking forward to bedtime when I can read the next chapter. A real New Yorker, a woman writer struggling, broke, divorced, stoned while being a mother to two precarious children and a lover to an unemployed, eccentric artist who never makes it big. This book is poignant and hilarious and wise and addictive. When I was done with it, I somehow felt enlightened, like I knew more about life now than I did before that first page. It was an odd but amazing feeling.” – Marina Rubin
Author Bio
Jill Hoffman is the Founding Editor of Mudfish (Box Turtle Press), and of the Mudfish Individual Poet Series. She has a B.A. from Bennington College, an M.A. from Columbia University and a Ph. D. from Cornell University. BLACK DIARIES (Mudfish Individual Poet Series # 2) was published by Box Turtle Press in 2000. Her first book of poems, Mink Coat, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1973. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974-75. Jilted, a novel, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1993. She has taught in major universities (Bard, Barnard, Brooklyn, Columbia) and published in major magazines, such as The New Yorker and Paris Review. She has led the Mudfish writing workshop in Tribeca since 1990. She is also a painter.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA