 |
|
Return to Previous Page
|
A girl caught between tract-house suburbia, bohemia,
and elite society in the late sixties.
Fiction
May 2007
$12 Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-56947-455-6
Download the Reading Group Guide
for this book (pdf) |
|
|
|
A Book Sense Notable
“Elegant, intensely witty....
Among the genre’s best, a dazzling exposition of ambition and disdain,
envy and insularity.... Always, it is Anna Shapiro’s perfect balance,
the knowledge and sharp sympathy that pervade her dialogue and description,
that makes Living on Air such a piercing joy.”
—Newsday |
“Intelligent…. Because it’s a story about art, it’s also a story about ego—the selfish monstrosity that can turn colleagues into competitors and family members into foes, the touchy cornerstone of identity, the inner force that helps us come to an awareness of who we really are.”
—The New York Times Book Review |
“Everything feels real to the point
of evoking smells and textures.... Authentic.... We want to be elegant,
sophisticated Maude.”
—Bust |
“Shapiro, in her third novel, is finely attuned to the self-conciousness and vulnerability of adolescence, and the slippery elision of money and sophistication.”
—New Yorker |
“Studded with pitch-perfect observations about adolescence, the suburbs, the 1960s, the books we read, the boys we knew and the things that obsessed us, Anna Shapiro has fashioned a satisfying novel that is like a dip into one’s own history.”
—Meg Wolitzer, The Position |
“With sentences that never falter and a perfect recall for the terrors and temptations of adolescence, Anna Shapiro gives us a story that is sometimes painful but always penetrating and fresh. She is a marvelous writer.”
—Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy |
|
In 1966 Long Island, fourteen-year-old Maude Pugh is not the typical Levittown girl. Artistic and intellectual, she’s always felt like an outsider in her town. Even worse, her father, an abstract artist, has painted the inside of their house black to better showcase his paintings. Maude feels like she’s living in an abstract painting, with no space for human figures. When she secures a scholarship to the prestigious Bay Farm School, she hopes that there she’ll find the place where she feels truly at home.
She soon befriends Weesie Herrick, a girl who lives on a nearby estate. Maude longs to inhabit Weesie’s world, while Weesie envies the Pughs’ bohemian lifestyle. Meanwhile, Maude is falling in love with Bay Farm. But just as she comes to feel fully at home there, family tensions and secrets threaten her foothold on happiness.
Anna Shapiro provides a vivid peek into Manhattan’s avant-garde art circles and the world of the old elite amid the cultural changes of the 1960s in this beautifully-written novel about a young girl’s struggle to find her own path to happiness.
ANNA SHAPIRO is the author of two novels, The Right
Bitch and Life and Love, Such as They Are, and a collection of essays, A
Feast of Words. She was the regular fiction reviewer for the New Yorker's "Briefly
Noted" column and has written for the magazine at greater length, as well
as for numerous other journals. She has illustrated three books and been an activist
and lobbyist on behalf of public open space in New York City.
Back to top
|
|
|
