About this item
A trip to Italy reignites a woman's desires to disastrous effect in this dark ode to womanhood, death, and sexTo cool-headed, fastidious Pricilla Messing, Italy will be an escape, a brief glimpse of freedom from a life that's starting to feel like one long decline. Rescued from the bedside of her difficult mother, forty-something Cilla finds herself called away to Rome to keep an eye on her wayward teenage niece, Hannah. But after years of caregiving, babysitting is the last thing Cilla wants to do. Instead she throws herself into Hannah's youthful, heedless world -- drinking, dancing, smoking -- relishing the heady atmosphere of the Italian summer. After years of feeling used up and overlooked, Cilla feels like she's coming back to life. But being so close to Hannah brings up complicated memories, making Cilla restless and increasingly reckless, and a dangerous flirtation with a teenage boy soon threatens to send her into a tailspin.With the sharp-edged insight of Ottessa Moshfegh and the taut seduction of Patricia Highsmith, The Worst Kind of Want is a dark exploration of the inherent dangers of being a woman. In her unsettling follow-up to Catalina, Liska Jacobs again delivers hypnotic literary noir about a woman whose unruly desires and troubled past push her to the brink of disaster.
About the Author
Liska Jacobs is the author of two acclaimed novels, Catalina and The Worst Kind of Want both published by MCD | FSG. To quote a review in The Believer: "The Worst Kind of Want presents Jacobs at her best: thinking through the fraught ethical problems and pitfalls of desire... Jacobs is establishing herself as a novelist who can probe what it means to be both selfish and vulnerable, asking with bald-faced earnestness: What, in 2019, are adult women allowed to want--and at what cost? " Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions and The Hairpin among others. She has an MFA from the University of California, Riverside.
