About this item
In the winter of 1984, Sharon Nicorvo was violently raped while delivering pizza to Fort Monmouth Army Base in New Jersey. At the same time, her seven-year-old son Jay was being subjected to repeated and secret sexual abuse by his babysitter. Best Copy Available delves into these devastating events and their long aftermath. Thirty years later, Nicorvo receives a photocopy of the criminal investigation report documenting that brutal night. This report offers a primer to better understand certain assumptions about class and race; sex and violence; crime and punishment; low and high culture; sanity, madness, and masculinity; and the facsimile nature of the truth. . As various American men -- some real, some imagined, all prone to violence -- move in and then out of their hardscrabble lives, mother and son spend decades avoiding and ultimately confronting what happened to them in that formative year.
About the Author
JAY BARON NICORVO is the author of a novel, THE STANDARD GRAND (St. Martin's Press) , picked for IndieBound's Indie Next List, Library Journal's Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts, and named "New and Noteworthy" by Poets & Writers.
He's published a poetry collection, DEADBEAT (Four Way Books, 2012) . His nonfiction can be found in Salon, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, and The Believer. He's been an editor at Ploughshares and at PEN America, the literary magazine of the PEN American Center, and was membership director for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses [clmp].
He lives on an old farm outside Battle Creek with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their son, and a couple dozen vulnerable chickens. Find Jay at www.nicorvo.net.
