Binnie Kirshenbaum

A Novel

Scenic Route

A Novel (P.S.)

Almost Perfect Moment, An

Rabbits for Food

Lila Moscowitz, a once-powerful poet, finds herself in a world of self-discovery as she ponders past and present relationships in an effort to understand her ability to love and be loved as her marriage breaks up.

Pure Poetry

Meet Lila Moscowitz, a smart-mouthed, Jewish American beauty with a voracious appetite for sex, a remarkable talent for outrageous lies, and an unerring knack for screwing up her life. An accomplished poet, renowned for writing "smut and filth in terza rima," she goes about her life in Pure Poetry with enough attitude and verve to win your heart forever. But since fleeing the all-consuming passion of her marriage to Max, the sexy German, she can no longer compose so much as a couplet; ghosts have taken over her Greenwich Village apartment, and the contrast between her feelings for her present lover and her former husband is breaking her heart. And neither her best friend, Carmen, nor her cross-dressing analyst, Leon, is able to soothe her angst over her impending thirty eighth birthday, an occasion fraught with a thirty-seven year tradition of emotional devastation. But time waits for no woman, and the dreaded birthday does bring insight: Love can be undone by the same desires that nurture it. Lila knows that she has got to take action, and in doing so she comes to realize some startling truths about herself, her capacity for love, and the nature of true freedom. Binnie Kirshenbaum's voice has been acclaimed by critics and readers alike. Already a bestselling author in Germany, Kirshenbaum demonstrates a brilliant maturity in Pure Poetry. Not since Erica Jong's Fear of Flying has a novel so captured a woman's heart and desires. Readers will cheer Pure Poetry for its heady mix of humor and sadness, and for its slyly unsettling visions of modern life.

History meets reality when biographer Hester Rosenfeld--very American and marginally Jewish--goes to Munich to research the life of Heinrich Falk and becomes his mistress. Born in Berlin in 1943, raised in the ruins of defeat by a generation of "murderers and cowards," Professor Falk is neither infamous nor famous--he is simply the German Everyman. Hester believes his life story could make for an important contemporary historical document--kitchen-table history. But as she uncovers more of his family history and its possible connection to Nazism, she finds herself reexamining her own feelings about her German immigrant parents and her complicated attraction to Heinrich. As the lovers' intimacy grows, each suspects the other of hiding something about the past. With the moral power of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, Kirshenbaum's searing novel bears powerful witness to history's unforgettable legacy and its continuing impact.

Binnie Kirshenbaum

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