Mislaid - Hardcover

Zink, Nell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062364774 ISBN 13: 9780062364777

Publisher: Ecco Pr, 2015

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

"A writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know. You might not want to believe this, but her sentences and stories are so strong and convincing that you'll have no choice."--Jonathan Franzen

"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

The bracing disconnect between sly, low-affect prose and Gothic strangeness recalls Flannery O'Connor and Jean Stafford--mid-century women you could imagine crossing paths with Peggy and shuddering."--Vulture

"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

"Zink's capacity for inventions is immense... [Mislaid] zips along with a giddy, lunatic momentum. It's perverse wackiness is irresistible; unlike just about everything engineered to make you laugh out loud, Zink's novel actually does, over and over again... She knows how to let her freak flag fly."--BookForum

"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

A high comedy of racial identity...Zink is a comic writer par excellence...Both that voice and the stories Zink tells are so startling, so seemingly without antecedent, that she would seem like an outsider artist, if she did not betray so much casual erudition."--New Yorker

"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 Pr
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0062364774
• ISBN 13: 9780062364777
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 242