Vendor
Cannell Agency Cynthia Cannell
Categories
Fiction & Related items

SWELL

Jill Eisenstadt

Jill Eisenstadt returns to her native Rockaway, Queens to expose a time, a town, and a family at their most vulnerable. Here, the Glassmans believe they’ve found refuge from post 9-11 Manhattan until 92-year-old murderer Rose appears to reclaim their beach house. Full of the dark humor and crisp observations that make her style so memorably distinctive, Eisenstadt’s SWELL is a rapid-paced and transporting read.

When Sue Glassman's family needs a new home, Sue relents, after years of resisting, and agrees to convert to Judaism. In return, Sue's father-in-law, Sy, buys the family--Sue, Dan, and their two daughters--a capacious but ramshackle beachfront house in Rockaway, Queens, a world away from the Glassmans' cramped Tribeca apartment. The catch? Sy is moving in, too. And the house is haunted. On the weekend of Sue's conversion party, ninety-year-old Rose, who (literally) got away with murder on the premises years earlier, shows up uninvited. Towing a suitcase-sized pocketbook, having escaped an assisted living facility in Forest Hills, Rose seems intent on moving back in. Enter neighbor Tim--formerly Timmy (see From Rockaway), a former lifeguard, former firefighter, and reformed alcoholic--who feels, for reasons even he can't explain, inordinately protective of the Glassmans. The collective nervous breakdown occasioned by Rose's return swells to operatic heights in a novel that charms and surprises on every page as it unflinchingly addresses the perils of living in a world rife with uncertainty. Jill Eisenstadt is the author of the novel FROM ROCKAWAY (Knopf 1987/Vintage Contemporaries 1998) published to wide praise when she was a 24-year-old Bennington College graduate. Her essays, articles, short fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, New York Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Bomb, The Best of the New York Times “City Section” and Best American Sex Writing. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Michael Drinkard.

Available products
Book Published 2017-06-06 by Little Brown

Comments

In this touching portrait of ordinary people grappling with the aftershocks of 9/11—memorials, uncertainty, death, and a new life—the emotional upheaval of a national tragedy leaves no one unaffected. Read more...

Our Quest for Safety: an interview with Jill Eisenstadt Read more...

Then again, it’s the wise ones who know that in hard times, you grab your people, have one drink too many and obsess over insignificant things. The louder and ruder the chatter, the better. Until you’ve got one of those gatherings that make visitors feel something’s terribly wrong, while the regulars know it’s just another day in the neighborhood. Frantic, disputatious, protective, distracted, shambolic, disheveled? Stay on the Manhattan side of the river and you’ll miss it: community. “You rack up enough real moments with people,” Eisenstadt reflects, “and they’ll poke at your psyche forever.” They’re all the cover you’ve got when that gun goes off.

Now, with the brat pack 30 years in the rearview window maybe Eisenstadt's work, and that of her colleagues, will be revised in a different context. Three decades later, we can finally read their books in a different light. Read more...

With a pitch-perfect narrative voice and plenty of humor, Eisenstadt captures the lives of her Mets-loving and Yankee-hating characters in vivid detail.

With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor…A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community.

French: Payot Rivages