Joan Frank

Douglas Trevor

Robert Boswell

Federico Falco

Bill Roorbach

Alexandra Marshall

Ted Kehoe

Andria Nacina Cole

Patricia Buddenhagen

Ploughshares Omnibus Volume 4

In her quartet of novellas, Joan Frank invites readers into the inner lives of characters bewildered by love, grief, and inexplicable affinities.

Where You're All Going

Curious, ruminative, and wry, this literary autobiography tours what Rachel Kushner called “the strange remove that is the life of the writer.” Frank’s essays cover a vast spectrum—from handling dismissive advice, facing the dilemma of thwarted ambition, and copying the generosity that inspires us, to the miraculous catharsis of letter-writing and some of the books that pull us through. Useful for writers at any stage of development, Late Work offers a seasoned artist’s thinking through the exploration of issues, paradoxes, and crises of faith. Like a lively conversation with a close, outspoken friend, each piece tells its experience from the trenches.

A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading

Late Work

Miss Kansas City is the story of an improbable friendship, set in the tumultuous mid-80s dotcom California, where youthful greed and blinkered innocence arrive intertwined. Friendless and reclusive, Alex Blue commutes two hours each way to a job that serves mainly as a place to bide time, until one day she meets the wealthy, worldly—and married—owner of a high-concept Bay Area lifestyle company. Meanwhile, the melancholy and closeted Morton Levi, yearning for a loving partner but stung by prior experience, lives a secret life outside the software information company he manages with a steady, efficient hand—the same company where Alex works. As ominous rumors of mergers and layoffs swirl, and Alex and Mort are pushed to the emotional brink by the vagaries of love, they find themselves forging an unexpected alliance. Miss Kansas City is a moving exploration of the notion of possibility, and of a seasoned hope that can emerge on the other side of loneliness and loss. Joan Frank is the author of the story collection Boys Keep Being Born, which was both a Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Award and Paterson Fiction Award finalist. Her stories appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Antioch Review,The Iowa Review, and Salmagundi. She is a MacDowell Colony and VCCA Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, recipient of a Barbara Deming Grant, and winner of the Iowa Fiction Award and Emrys Fiction Award. She lives in Northern California. Miss Kansas City is her first novel.

Miss Kansas City

Part memoir, part handbook, part survey of the contemporary literary scene, Joan Frank’s Because You Have To: A Writing Life is a collection of essays that, taken together, provide a walking tour of the writing life. Frank’s aim is to form a coherent vision, one that may provide some communion about realities of the writer's vocation that have struck her as rarely revealed. Frank offers what she has learned as a writer not only to other writers, but to those to whom good writing matters. Her insights about "thinking on paper" are never dogmatic or pontifical; rather, they are cordial and intellectually welcoming. Original, witty, and practical, Frank ably steers us through the journey of her own life as a writer, as well as through the careers and work of other writers. Her subjects range widely, from the “boot camp” conditioning of marketing work to squaring off with rejection and envy; from sustaining belief in art’s necessity to the baffling subjectivity of literary perception and the magical books that nourish writers. Frank’s personal journey is wonderfully told, so that what in these essays is particular becomes useful and universal.

A Writing Life

Because You Have To

Elizabeth Fishel

"Desperate Women Need to Talk to You," originally a headline for an advertisement for phone sex, was spotted one day by author Joan Frank. Marveling at the irony and bluntness, Frank thought of the similarity to her own life: woman desperately trying to make sense of midlife. She decided to tell all. With both wit and sharp-hewn honesty, Joan Frank tackles the big and little issues facing the enormous number of women rounding the corner into middle age: our longing for the fountain of youth; that we can no longer eat whatever we want without getting fat; the decision to have children or not; the perils of pantyhose, and the agony and ecstasy of entering a new relationship.

Desperate Women Need to Talk to You

The Outlook for Earthlings traces an unusual, difficult friendship across a lifetime, between women of stunningly opposite natures. Melanie Taper is timid, compelled to obey and venerate authority. Yet in unguarded moments she demonstrates such deadly insight into human foibles as to suggest a strength that has, for dark reasons, deliberately hidden itself lifelong. Scarlet Rand, by contrast, is rash, willful, and impatient of reverence of any stripe. Scarlet is shocked by Mel's passive reserve; despite her obvious gifts, Mel is--bafflingly--self-erasing. Mel's Billy Budd-like saintliness maddens Scarlet--because finally and most troublingly, Scarlet disbelieves it. Their friendship suggests to each a final frontier, a saving sanctuary. Yet at its core, a pained impasse soon becomes evident: each woman takes a secret, moral offense at the other's inmost nature--and choices. Living out these differences--against awareness of the illness which is slowly destroying one of them--proves an ultimate challenge. In each, a reckoning must occur. The Outlook for Earthlings examines what women want, amid conflicting layers of need. It ponders beginnings, endings, and Virginia Woolf's declaration that good angels must be killed. It considers the limits of friendship--and of the act of witnessing. At its heart, it asks how we may finally measure a life--and who should do the measuring.

Joan Frank

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