Publisher Description
One of the many well-educated Ivy League graduates with literary ambitions who flock to New York City every year, twenty-five-year-old Melissa Fleischer has the great fortune to work as the assistant to Austin Bloch, an editor responsible for refining and publishing the work of some of America's most esteemed writers. But after she begins working at this prestigious magazine in the late 1970s, Mel soon learns that the extravagantly long lunches her boss indulges in actually belie his affairs with a stream of young women. Mel is left in the distressing position of lying about these never-ending betrayals to Austin's wife, Hillarie, who often calls while he is out of the office.
But then, unexpectedly, the New Yorker begins publishing Mel's short stories, offering a spectacular start to what she hopes will be a long and fruitful writing career. Unfortunately, the exhilaration of being published by the magazine she reveres most is soon diminished both by Mel's deeply painful discovery that her own marriage—like Austin's—is far from idyllic, and her continuing complicity in Austin's betrayals. And nothing seems more difficult than the effort it will take to keep her marriage from falling apart.
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About Marian Thurm
Marian Thurm is the author of seven novels and four short-story collections, including the most recent, Today Is Not Your Day, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her novel The Clairvoyant was a New York Times Notable Book. Her short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Michigan Quarterly, the Southampton Review, and many other magazines, and have been included in The Best American Short Stories and numerous other anthologies. Her books have been translated into Japanese, Swedish, Dutch, and German. She has taught creative writing at Yale, Barnard College, the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Brooklyn College.
About Rebecca Gibel
Rebecca Gibel is an award-winning stage, television, and voice actress. The narrator of over fifty audiobooks, Rebecca is facile in a wide variety of genres. Rebecca has worked across the country at theaters such as Trinity Rep, Cleveland Play House, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Intiman Theatre, and the Arden Theatre Company. She holds a BA from the College of William & Mary and an MFA in acting from Brown University/Trinity Rep.