Mislaid - Softcover

Zink, Nell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062364782 ISBN 13: 9780062364784

Publisher: Ecco Press, 2016

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original novel from an exciting, unconventional new voice the author of the acclaimed The Wallcreeper about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire.

Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingenue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The two are mismatched from the start she s a lesbian, he s gay but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.

Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African-American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee s children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie deals with his father s compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother s lies she knows neither her real age, nor that she is white, nor that she has any other family.

Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare."

About this title

Review:

"There's nothing derivative about Nell Zink's hip, hilarious and unexpectedly moving novel Mislaid... Zink has a genius for making the bizarre seem natural... makes for one of the most satisfying happy endings in recent fiction."--Wall Street Journal

"Zink's energy pulses in narration. [She] is original, unsentimental, erudite, and something of a naturalist. Her vocabulary is tremendous [and] her sentences are penetrating and agile."--Harper's Magazine

"[Zink] further proves her narrative chops as she spins a darkly satirical story ... Zink's frankness on topics like gender, racial, socioeconomic, and sexual identity politics is refreshing and bold, but it is her strong writing and lucid sentences which truly reel readers in-and keep them there."--L Magazine

"[Zink] makes her big publishing debut with with this unconventional but ultimately brilliant novel that takes family, race, and the how decisions you make could resonate for years to come."--Men's Journal

"Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper was the most impressive debut of 2014...her second novel, the hilarious and genius Mislaid, which restores a kind of Whitmania to American fiction, by which I mean that it convincingly covers race, class, gender, and sexuality in the briefest of spaces with the sharpest of minds.."--Flavorwire

"A deceptively slim epic of family life that rivals a Greek tragedy in drama and wisdom...deftly handles race, sexuality, and coming of age. Zink's insight is beautifully braided into understated prose that never lets the tension subside... it all points to Zink's masterly subtlety and depth."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Crafting a zany story with outlandish characters doing the unexpected, Zink successfully creates a comedy of errors offering a happy ending for an impossible situation."--Library Journal

"Mislaid is a sprawling multi-generational saga of a Southern family that is as absurd and hilarious as it is tragic and seeing."--VanityFair.com

"The title of Nell Zink's new novel is just the first wry, indecorous joke in this zany-brainy story...Zink writes with such faux innocence that her cracks about sexuality and race detonate only after she has riffed off to the next unlikely incident."--Washington Post

"A comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare."--Paste

About the Author:

Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Private Novelist, and Nicotine, and her writing has appeared in n+1, Granta, and Harper's. She lives near Berlin, Germany.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0062364782
• ISBN 13: 9780062364784
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256