Join us as we welcome two amazing and unique authors.

Marcy Dermansky’s BAD MARIE

Marie is tall, beautiful, thirty years old––and a convicted felon.  In this fresh, suspensful, and witty take on the road novel, author Marcy Dermansky gives us a character with more than a little fondness for whiskey, chocolate, adultery, and kidnapping––and one whom you may be surprised to find yourself rooting for.
 
Marie is not your everyday nanny.  She’s working for her childhood frenemy Ellen, an upwardly mobile Manhattan executive. Not an ideal situation, sure, but it’s the only job that Marie, just out of six years in jail, can get. After Marie moves in with Ellen, things get complicated, and almost before she knows what she’s doing, Marie has absconded to Paris with Ellen’s daughter and husband.  On the run and out of her depth, Marie will experience the highs and lows of foreign culture, lawless living, and motherhood as she figures out how to be an adult; how deeply she can love; and what it truly means to be “bad.”

“ … a wickedly nihilistic and suspenseful tale of erotic mayhem.”
—Booklist
 
“It’s sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil.”
—Frederick Barthelme

Marcy Dermansky is a MacDowell fellow and the winner of the 2002 Smallmouth Press Andre Dubus Novella Award and the 1999 Story Magazine Carson McCullers short story prize. Her 2005 novel Twins was widely praised by the New York Times, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Village Voice, and many others.  She is a film critic for About.com and belongs to New York Film Critics Online society. Dermansky lives in Astoria, New York, with her husband, the writer Jürgen Fauth, and their daughter Nina.

Charlie Smith’s THREE DELAYS

The long-awaited, and perhaps best, novel from iconic author Charlie Smith, his first in fourteen years, THREE DELAYS is a prose tragedy of particular grace and moral purpose that tells the story of two lovers who combat their passions and their fate. 
 
Billy Brent and Alice Stephens are star-crossed like all great lovers. Their need for one another drives them from Istanbul to Miami, Venice to Mexico, with existential breaks and jail time in between.  After run-ins with boy preachers, lonely women, seafaring criminals, and the dark corners of the soul, Billy and Alice lose themselves deep in a desert wilderness to learn that sometimes the trail simply forks.
 
An exploration of the true particulars of obsession, Three Delays is a book of the spirit, of how broken people love and persist from darkness to darkness.

“Three Delays is so stunningly composed, so wildly, implausibly, excessively written, that it makes the entire shelf of novels from the last generation superfluous. … Want to read about how harrowing and essential love can really be? Dip in here. Be made alive.”
—Rick Moody
 
“There are writers...who by dint of prayer or genius or some stubborn curse emerge with works of appalling brilliance.  Charlie Smith appears to be one of these.”
—Lorrie Moore
 
“This isn’t Smith’s first tale of toxic and nihilistic obsession, but it is his most ravishing,
painfully funny, and wildly mythic. … This is infernal romance––hallucinatory,
wanton, noirish, terrifying, and magnificently tragic.”
—Booklist (starred review)

Charlie Smith is the author of six novels and seven books of poetry.  Three of his works have been named New York Times Notable Books.  His numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Aga Khan Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Nation and numerous other magazines and journals. He has taught at Princeton University and University of Iowa, and was a Coal Royalty Chairholder at University of Alabama. He lives in New York City and Key West.