Summer Without Men

And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should get back together at the end of The Awful Truth? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren't there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia's husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a pause. This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia's release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people's home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her--her mother and her close friends, the Five Swans, and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband--and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.

From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes Siri Hustvedt's provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
Published: 04/26/2011
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.41lbs
Size: 8.31h x 5.67w x 0.55d
ISBN: 9780312570606


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 05/15/2011 pg. 75
Booklist 04/15/2011 pg. 22
New York Times Book Review 05/01/2011 pg. 9
New York Times Book Review 05/08/2011 pg. 22
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2011
Publishers Weekly 02/14/2011
BookPage 05/01/2011

About the Author
SIRI HUSTVEDT was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She moved to New York City in 1978 and earned her Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University in 1986. She is the author of several novels, including The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and The Blindfold, as well as the collections of essays, A Plea for Eros, Mysteries of the Rectangle, and The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.