Thanks to Deb Zipf of Meryl Moss Media, Inc., I am giving away one print copy of ‘Queen for a Day: A Novel in Stories’ by Maxine Rosaler.
Description Queen for a Day: Novel in Stories by Maxine Rosaler
After Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son, Danny, is diagnosed with autism, she finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son’s. It is a position she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach.
In chapters told from Mimi’s point of view and theirs, these women emerge as conflicted, complex individuals, totally unsuited for sainthood, often dreaming of the day they can just walk away. Taking its title from the 1950s reality TV show in which the contestants—housewives living lives filled with pain and suffering—competed with one another for deluxe refrigerators and sets of stainless steel silverware, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women coping under enormous pressure.
In her impressive debut, Rosaler tells their stories in ironic, precise, and vivid prose, with humor and insight born of firsthand experience, and offers readers “the gut-heaving, throat-choking, darkly comic truth—about parenthood, marriage, love, rage, and hard-won survival” (Eileen Pollack, author of The Bible of Dirty Jokes).
Praise Queen for a Day: Novel in Stories by Maxine Rosaler
“With intelligence and sympathy, this compassionate and darkly humorous debut tells the stories of mothers of children with disabilities”-Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
“An engrossing and compassionate collection showing motherhood in its most unrelenting form.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“I was both moved and impressed by this novel, and the intelligence and sympathy with which the author presents her afflicted characters.” —Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Foreign Affairs and The Language of Houses
“Maxine Rosaler’s ‘novel in stories’ resembles Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, except rather than surviving an absurd and unjust war, the burden here is one of mothering an autistic child. Like O’Brien, Rosaler explores the mettle and morality of Mimi Slavitt on the ‘battlefield of her existence.’” —DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, author of Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays
“Maxine Rosaler’s stories are both hard-edged and comic, both laced with despair and hopeful against all expectation. New York City is the setting, a struggle to prosper in the face of bad choices and deeply ingrained perversity is the theme. Constant, however, is a narrative voice that proves irresistible, and a craftsman’s approach to the construction of these contemporary parables.” —C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor, The Atlantic
About Maxine Rosaler
MAXINE ROSALER has had fiction and nonfiction published in The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, Fifth Wednesday, Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review and other literary magazines. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction. Her short stories have been cited in editions of Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.
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Giveaway Queen for a Day: Novel in Stories by Maxine Rosaler
This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on June 221, 2018 midnight pacific time. Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.