About this item
A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises - and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad - long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter - grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband.Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage.Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election,Thisbe Nissen's new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp - a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.
About the Author
Thisbe Nissen is the author of three novels, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) , (Knopf, 2004) , (Knopf, 2001) , and a story collection, (University of Iowa Press, 1999, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award) . She is also the co-author with of , a collection of stories, recipes, and art collages. Her fiction has been published in , and , and anthologized in and . Her nonfiction has appeared in and , and is featured in several essay anthologies. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the James Michener-Copernicus Society, The University of Iowa, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, and was the 19th Zale Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University. She has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Brandeis University, The New School's Eugene Lang College and in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University. These days, she teaches undergrad, MFA and PhD students at Western Michigan University. She and her husband, , are parents of two rescue cats, many sprightly chickens, and one intriguing human child. They dream, one day, of raising goats.
