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      A Woman Named Drown

      by Padgett Powell
      Published
      May 1987
      Main Genre
      General Fiction General Fiction
      Rating
      Pages
      152
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      About This Book

      Hailed by Time as an "extravagantly comic" novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America's South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress–cum-pool shark

      On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a "woman named Drown." He moves in with her and just as quickly begins encountering her strange compatriots. Before he knows it, they're heading farther south together—to Florida—where the data that the dropout scientist is collecting from life's laboratory is about to get quite contradictory.

      Richly influenced by offbeat literary giant Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powell's A Woman Named Drown offers readers a smorgasbord of literary strangeness—a surreal series of adventures in which nothing much—and yet everything—happens at once.  

      Genres & Themes

      Genres

      General Fiction

      Subgenres

      Literary

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      Formats & Editions

      Browse the different covers, formats, and publication history for this title.

      Paperback

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      Paperback
      Jun 1988 Henry Holt ISBN13 9780805007503 ISBN10 0805007504
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      Trade Paperback
      Jan 2014 Open Road Publishing ISBN13 9781480464216 ISBN10 148046421X
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      Hardcover

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      Hardcover
      First Edition May 1987 Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN13 9780374292041 ISBN10 0374292043
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      eBook

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      eBook
      Sep 2013 Open Road Publishing ISBN13 9781480441743 ISBN10 1480441740
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      eBook
      Sep 2013 Open Road Publishing ISBN13 9781480441620 ISBN10 1480441627
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      eBook
      Sep 2013 Open Road Publishing ISBN10 B00EOIB3WS
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      Audio

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      Audible
      Oct 2013 Audible Studios ISBN10 B00FQUC7YG
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