Billy and Girl: A Novel (British Literature Series) - Softcover

Levy, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564782026 ISBN 13: 9781564782021

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999

Synopsis

In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are, they completely out of control and ready to explode?

About this title

Review

"Best of all is Levy's smart, modern prose style. The South-African-born Londoner writes with a sensibility once called "Beat." An excellent, entertaining selection."?-- "Booklist"

"An ambitious work by the author of "Beautiful Mutant"s, this complex and touching novel explores the themes of identity and a missing moral center with rare aplomb."?-- "PW"

About the Author

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination," including "Pax," "Heresies" for the Royal Shakespeare Company, "Clam," "Call Blue Jane," "Shiny Nylon," "Honey Babu Middle England," "Pushing the Prince into Denmark," and "Macbeth-False Memories," some of which are published in "Levy: Plays 1."

Deborah wrote and published her first novel "Beautiful Mutants," when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include "Swallowing Geography," "The Unloved," and "Billy and Girl." She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1564782026
• ISBN 13: 9781564782021
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 183