Cassandra At The Wedding (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Baker, Dorothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590171128 ISBN 13: 9781590171127

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2004

Synopsis

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.

Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has.

First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.

About this title

Review:

Knowing, wise and a cracking read.

(Irish Independent)

An important achievement...intoxicating fun.

(Lillian Smith)

[Baker’s] ear for dialogue is acute, her prose immaculate...this is a novel of exceptional quality.”

(Times Literary Supplement)

I—whose usual bed time is ten o’clock—stayed up all night reading that exquisite Cassandra at the Wedding—dazzled by the pyrotechnics of such an artist. I can only think back to Young Man with a Horn, and be overwhelmed by Dorothy Baker’s continuing brilliance.

(Carson McCullers)

Belongs with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and McCullers’s Member of the Wedding as a modern American classic.

(Georgia Hammick)

A brilliantly told story...remarkably subtle...inexporably lucid.

(The New York Times)

'these marvellous books are witty and assured.  Her tone is dark but jaunty, the writing off-handedly smart.'

(London Review of Books)

Book Description:

*Cassandra at the Wedding was first published in 1962, but its freshness and immediacy place it with the best of contemporary writing. *A fresh, insightful, moving and funny portrayal of sisterly love.

About this edition

• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1590171128
• ISBN 13: 9781590171127
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 241