About This Book
Three novellas by a writer who "writes past the point where many writers stop, trusting her characters to deliver aspects of themselves previously undetected," said Publishers Weekly of this collection of portraits of artists and intellectuals behaving badly, foolishly, and occasionally bravely. "Auslander" is the story of a translator whose self-imposed isolation is dramatically disrupted by a Romanian philosopher whose wife is a brilliant, untranslated poet; "Hope Among Men" is a postmodern fairy tale–or a literary romantic comedy (of errors)–which follows Hope in the course of her ill-fated romances with boyfriends named Heartache and Misery; and the title novella, "A New and Glorious Life," a contemporary retelling of Chekhov's "Lady With the Pet Dog," set in an artists' colony, considers the question of whether one can, in fact, be redeemed by love.These novellas have a psychological depth and acute worldliness one associates with continental fiction. Michelle Herman's sympathies bridge generations and genders; her intelligence conveys both the lovingness and coldness of the way we live now. Her work is a sophisticated pleasure.--Philip LopateThese three novellas are three gems, each with distinctive coloring and distinctive authorial voice. The winter atmosphere of the artists' colony in the title novella is captured in its unique mixture of aggressive companionship and loneliness, and frames an unusual love story played against a critical view of a marriage of two incompatibles. The highlight of this book, however, is the novella 'Hope Among Men.' . . . Herman's is a subtle, generous, humorous and touching triptych on the theme of love, oh, love, oh careless love.--Josef SkvoreckyIn A New and Glorious Life Michelle Herman looks with intelligence, sympathy, and wit at the lives of a wide range of contemporary men and women--some of them eventually glorious and others sad but holding their own.--Alison LurieReading Michelle Herman's collection is like eating Godiva chocolates, something so exquisitely enjoyable you can't get enough of it. How often, in this day and age, does one get to read a love story which is also a literary gem? These novellas are the stuff of classics.-Marly Swick
