About this item
English professor and aspiring novelist, Grace Warner spends her days teaching four sections of "Beowulf for Cretins" to bored and disinterested students at one of New England's "hidden ivy" colleges. Not long after she is dumped by her longtime girlfriend, Grace meets the engaging and mysterious Abbie on a cross-country flight. Sparks fly on and off the plane as the two strangers give in to one night of reckless passion with no strings attached, and no contact information exchanged. Back home at St. Albans, the college rocks Grace's world when it announces the appointment of a new president, the first woman in its 165-year history. Cue Abbie -- and cue Grace's collision course with a neurotic dog named Grendel, a fractious rival for tenure, and a woman called Ochre, in what very well might be Grace's last real shot at happiness.
About the Author
From her early days, growing up on the western frontier of Pennsylvania, Ann McMan found creative ways to exercise her gift for fiction. Her first literary endeavors were modest--mostly confined to aphorisms scrawled on cracked pavement with colored chalk. "FREE UPPER VOLTA!"But as the years passed and her skills increased, she branched out into literary nonfiction--best exemplified by the abstracts that follow."Please excuse Ann from gym this week; she has contracted a virulent case of Norwegian Scabies."Sometimes, the performances were less effective."Please excuse Ann from this week's field trip to the IXL Cottage Cheese Creamery. She is suffering from acute bouts of ague and malaria, which, combined, render it impossible for her to travel by bus." (Ann was unaware that outbreaks of malaria were extremely rare in the Allegheny Mountains. Four days in after-school detention helped her cultivate a greater appreciation for the rigors of research.) _________________________________________College at an indifferent liberal arts institution taught Ann that understanding subject/verb agreement was not enough to secure her fame and fortune. After graduation, she got a job driving a young adult bookmobile--and spent her days piloting the great rig across the dusty back roads of rural North Carolina. Her duties included making certain that the mobile library always contained at least six copies of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, visiting the county juvenile detention unit (it was a great way to catch up with her brothers) , and showing public service films about safe sex to pre-teens at 4-H Clubs all across her part of "The New South."Soon, the allure of higher education coaxed Ann back to school. For the past three decades, Ann has worked at a succession of premier institutions, designing marketing and advancement materials that promote, promulgate, and extol the benefits of indifferent liberal arts education. Somebody has to do it.All this time, she continued to write. And when, at the ripe old age of thirty, she realized that she was not like other girls, the great world of lesbian literature opened its arms and provided her with a safe haven in which to grow and learn about her new identity. She will forever be indebted to those literary pioneers who had the courage, the talent, and the temerity to gift us all with an art form of our own. Ann's first and subsequent attempts at writing lesbian fiction have been heartfelt attempts to pay that great gift forward. _________________________________________Ann's themes are timeless--they are built around the things that make the world go 'round, like love, money, and modern class distinctions. She writes to what we all respect: the genuine, the authentic, and the deserving. Yet she mocks those things that we all despise, like the affected, the pretentious, and the malicious. She wields a metaphorical church-key that opens up a world tha
