The Correspondence Artist

by Barbara Browning

Overview

For three years, an unremarkable woman has been carrying on with an internationally recognized artist, largely via email. Fame contaminates things. There are those who stand to profit from information about this affair, and others who stand to lose. So she creates a series of correspondent, alternative lovers in a kind of self-destructing roman à clef.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780983247128
Publisher:	Two Dollar Radio
Publication date:	03/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	522 KB

About the Author

Barbara Browning got a doctorate in comparative literature while also performing as a dancer in Brazil, New York, and Paris. She taught in the English Department at Princeton and then the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

Editorial Reviews

Browning toys with form in her quirky debut, an epistolary love story that, despite a few misfires—the images, for instance, sprinkled throughout feel like unfortunate clip art—should hook readers whose tastes run to the unconventional. The narrator, Vivian, recounts via e-mails her love affair with an artist, who, at different times in the book is an Israeli novelist, a Vietnamese multimedia artist, a Basque poet, and a Malian musician. The narrator creates these characters ostensibly to protect the privacy of her famous lover, and her accounts of her affair vary slightly with each incarnation to reveal incrementally the personality of her "true" paramour and build toward different versions of a betrayal—Vivian's kidnapping by Basque anarchists, a run-in with a Lycra-clad Medusa. Though the story sometimes becomes mired too deeply in its own concept, Browning relentlessly explores her theme of love's many faces, giving readers a rewardingly offbeat novel that's by turns sexy, humorous, and insightful. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly