Bad Marie: A Novel (P.S.) - Softcover

Dermansky, Marcy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061914711 ISBN 13: 9780061914713

Publisher: HarpPeren, 2010

Synopsis

“Reading Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie is like spending a rainy afternoon in a smaller, older movie theater watching a charming French movie with a woman (or a man) you’ve just met on the street and already like far too much. It’s sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil.” — Frederick Barthelme

“Dermansky excels at depicting extreme emotional states and how we rationalize them.” —Village Voice

From the critically-acclaimed author of Twins, Marcy Dermansky, comes a highly original novel of Manhattan, Paris, and Mexico; of love and motherhood; and of life on the lam. Fans of Heather O’Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals) and A.M. Homes (Music for Torching) will revel in the wicked delights of Bad Marie.

About this title

Review:

“Marcy Dermansky’s slim picaresque follows the misadventures of a nanny who absconds to Paris with her charge and the toddler’s dashing father. Marie is the amoral engineer of multiple train wrecks, but in Dermansky’s hands she’s somehow irresistible.” (Time magazine)

“Dermansky does proud the long, often sketchy, sometimes illustrious tradition of transgressive fiction with BAD MARIE . . . Her Marie is no cry-baby Anna Karenina fated to a star-crossed love for which she pays with her life.” (Elle)

“Not enough women write novels like this one. Dermansky is funny and fearless. I like Marie so much because she seems to care so little whether I like her or not. That’s a working definition of badass. Bad Marie is one.” (Esquire)

“[Marie is] an antiheroine for our time . . . A page-turning melodrama told with chilled cosmopolitan irony, the moral puzzles at the heart of BAD MARIE linger after the delicious meringue of the book has been consumed. Cool trick, Ms. Dermansky.” (Newsday)

“Deliciously wicked.” (Slate)

“I didn’t want to finish this book any time soon, didn’t want to emerge from its dark and wondrous world. My God, what a writer -- absolutely unpredictable, wild with intellect, spilling with charm and sadness and humanity. Marie, the main character here, is literary gold, worthy of Flaubert.” (Mary Robison)

“Marcy Dermansky’s BAD MARIE is so very very bad that I enjoyed every word. A tour de force in mounting suspense as its witless narrator and the baby she’s stolen careen from one all-too-probable disaster to the next. Delicious.” (Terese Svoboda, author of Cannibal and Pirate Talk or Mermelade)

“By positing a character who’s indulged in all of the deadly sins, Dermansky challenges the reader to finally and forever denounce her character Marie. The fact that this reader can’t is testament to the book’s power and smarts. A naughty pleasure, a philosophical romp, heady hedonism: what could be better?” (Antonya Nelson, author of Nothing Right)

“[BAD MARIE is] sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil.” (Frederick Barthelme)

“Marcy Dermansky makes it easy to love Marie, a husband-stealing, baby-snatching, underachieving ex-con . . . Fast-paced and unsentimental, BAD MARIE blazes with life.” (Barb Johnson, author of More of This World or Maybe Another)

From the Back Cover:

Bad Marie is the story of Marie, tall, voluptuous, beautiful, thirty years old, and fresh from six years in prison for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery. The only job Marie can get on the outside is as a nanny for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall, an upwardly mobile Manhattan executive whose mother employed Marie's mother as a housekeeper. After Marie moves in with Ellen, Ellen's angelic baby Caitlin, and Ellen's husband, a very attractive French novelist named Benoit Doniel, things get complicated, and almost before she knows what she's doing, Marie has absconded to Paris with both Caitlin and Benoit Doniel. On the run and out of her depth, Marie will travel to distant shores and experience the highs and lows of foreign culture, lawless living, and motherhood as she figures out how to be an adult; how deeply she can love; and what it truly means to be "bad".

About this edition

• Publisher: HarpPeren
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0061914711
• ISBN 13: 9780061914713
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240