David Plante

A Memoir of Three

Difficult Women

A Novel

The Age of Terror

Francouer Novels

Scott Spencer

Difficult Women, the book with which David Plante made his name, presents three portraits-each one of them as detailed, textured, and imposing as the those of Lucian Freud-of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and in their own way difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself. The book begins with Plante?s portrait of Jean Rhys in her old age, when after years of silence that had left her great novels of the 1920s and ?30s virtually unknown, she published The Wide Sargasso Seaand became a minor celebrity. Rhys, however, can hardly be said to be enjoying her new success. A terminal alcoholic, she curses and staggers and rants in the hotel room she has chosen to live in like King Lear on the heath, while Plante looks impassively on. Sonia Orwell is Plante?s second subject, a suave exploiter and hapless victim of her beauty and social prowess, while the unflappable, brilliant, and impossibly opinionated Germaine Greer sails through the final pages of Plante?s book, ever ready to set the world, and any erring companion, right.

“Nikos and I live together as lovers, as everyone knows, and we seem to be accepted because it’s known that we are lovers. In fact, we are, according to the law, criminals in our making love with each other, but it is as if the laws don’t apply. It is as if all the conventions of sex and clothes and art and music and drink and drugs don’t apply here in London . . .” In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for forty years. At a moment of “absolute respect for differences,” London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Friendships with Stephen and Natasha Spender, Francis Bacon, Sonia Orwell, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and David Hockney, and meetings with such Bloomsbury luminaries as E. M. Forster and Duncan Grant, and a developing friendship with Philip Roth living in London with Claire Bloom, opened up worlds within worlds; connections appeared to crisscross, invisibly, through the air, interconnecting everyone. David Plante has kept a diary of his life for more than half a century. Both a deeply personal memoir and a fascinating and significant work of cultural history, this first volume spans his first twenty years in London, beginning in the mid-sixties, and pieces together fragments of diaries, notes, sketches, and drawings to reveal a beautiful, intimate portrait of a relationship and a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.

A Diary

Becoming a Londoner

Further adventures in the artistic milieux of the last fifty years, a tale of love, Germaine Greer and, brilliantly, Philip Roth

A Memoir

Worlds Apart

A powerful and tragic memoir about the lifelong love between two men, from a well-loved and critically acclaimed author

A Memoir of Grief

The Pure Lover

Kris Girrell

A Married Man's Survival Guide is a straight-shooting, no-nonsense guide to what it takes to thrive and prosper as a man in a long-term committed relationship. Based on the guidance of "masters" who have 30 or more years of committed married life, the Guide takes men through such things as preparing for life in this wilderness called marriage to your personal "fitness" routine to ensure lasting success. Along the way, the Guide deals with handling your wife's emotions, dealing with her "upsets" and even walks men through such touchy subjects as separation, divorce and affairs. The concluding chapter contains "250 things you can do to bring a smile to her face" and is based on a challenge the authors gave a men's class they were teaching. The editor writes, "Smartly written as a jungle survival manual, the Guide relies on generous doses of tongue-in-cheek humor to move the reader along at a comfortable pace with plenty of been-there-done-that candid anecdotes add appeal and credibility."

A Married Man's Survival Guide

Set in the seamy world of the Russian sex slave trade, The Age of Terror is the harrowing story of Joe, a disillusioned young American expatriate and lapsed Catholic who searches for life's meaning in the Soviet Union on the eve of its disintegration. Plante plays brilliantly with our assumptions of both the United States and Russia, and ultimately proclaims a universal theme of sacredness and redemption.

A daughter of Jewish refugees searches for love and a spiritual home in this novel by the National Book Award–nominated author of Difficult Women. Brought up in a secular household on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Nancy Green knows suspiciously little about her parents’ past. She knows they escaped Germany, avoiding the fate of so many of their fellow Jews during World War II, but the few family heirlooms they brought to the United States are reminders of a lost life that, for Nancy, remains shrouded in mystery. She seeks connection and a sense of belonging, a relationship in which she can find some sort of religious fulfillment. Unfortunately, Nancy’s first encounter is with a Hasidic man who, dissatisfied with Judaism, has taken vows to become a monk. Then, while studying English literature in Boston, she meets a Catholic boy who captures her interest, but he’s desperate to escape his overbearing mother and the clutches of the Church. After a devastating breakup, Nancy finally settles down with a husband whose background and beliefs seem at least similar to her own. Perhaps now she’ll stop yearning for something more, and trade volatility and heartbreak for a sensible, practical life. But forcing a fit—into a society, a sect, a family, or even a marriage—isn’t easy for anyone, and Nancy still has a long way to travel before she finds her true home. From an acclaimed author of both fiction and memoirs, including National Book Award finalist The Family, American Stranger is a wise and insightful story about the search for identity, and how our real lives are far more complex than our labels. “Plante . . . is always worth reading.” —The Washington Post

American Stranger

An evocation of the prostitution underworld of modern-day Russia follows Joe, a young American who becomes caught up in the erotic and emotional turmoil surrounding Zoya and Gerald, who run a white slavery ring.

David Plante

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