Kate Braverman

Probes the strained relationships between a woman and her abrasive mother, her cancer-stricken father, an ex-husband who is permanently tuned into Star Trek, and Jason, her erotic but higly manipulative lover. Reprint.

A Novel

Lithium for Medea

An Accidental Memoir

Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles

The author of The Incantation of Frida K. traces her coming-of-age in Los Angeles in the 1950s, anti-war activities during her education at Berkeley, experiences with single motherhood within the east L.A. barrio, struggles with alcohol, and relocation after her marriage to New York's Allegheny Mountains.

Lithium for Medea 10-Copy

Squandering the Blue

A collection of short stories that focus on women living on life's edges, grasping at hope, permanence, and meaning in spite of their chronic dissociation and ennui

Stories

Small Craft Warnings

Poems

Hurricane Warnings

Lullaby for Sinners

Haunting new stories about girls on the brink of adulthood, women on the verge of breakdowns, and families undone by past deceptions. "Kate Braverman is a writer of astonishing versatility and lyricism. Her stories are brilliantly rendered, painfully intimate portraits of individuals who come alive on the page as if illuminated by strobe lighting. With remarkable precision she tracks the restless motions of a mind searching for its reflection in the world—a continuous interrogation of the self that sweeps us along with it, as in a mysterious adventure."—Joyce Carol Oates "If fame did not find Braverman when the moment was right, perhaps it will make amends now that the moment is wrong. . . . Braverman excels at flooding readers in images that throb with menace or pleasure, as if descriptive language were a vein into which our most primal fears and desires could be injected."—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker "The book feels timeless, think Transparent, sans the trans . . . Kate Braverman, an underground literary icon through decades of razor-sharp writing, returns with a gorgeously observed collection of stories about contemporary Jewish identity. It's profound, realistic, and funny in equal measure."—David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly "Braverman daringly, ravishingly, and resoundingly dramatizes the profound consequences of delusions, lies, ignorance, anger, cruelty, poverty, disappointment, conformity, inebriation, and violence with high imagination, sensual precision, cutting humor, and bracing insight."—Donna Seaman, Booklist *Starred review "Braverman writes forthright but beautiful sentences. Her details are so vivid that they feel like memories . . . "—Publishers Weekly, *Starred/Boxed review "Kate Braverman is an original. Reading her is like hitching a ride on a runaway train, always dangerous, always thrilling, always a knockout. Seppuku is all that and more."—Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake "Braverman is the godmother of literary bad girls and a connoisseur of the shattered beauty glittering in the wreckage of her characters' lives. A Good Day for Seppuku celebrates the Braverman vision, and frames her legacy."—Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M. A thirteen-year-old girl must choose between her mother in Beverly Hills or her pot-growing father in the Allegheny Mountains. Dr. Bernie Roth and his wife Chloe reside in a grand hacienda in La Jolla. Their children are in college, and their disappointments are profound. But Bernie has his doctor's bag of elixirs for the regrets of late middle age. Mrs. Barbara Stein, a high school teacher, looks like she'd sacrifice her life for Emily Dickinson's honor. That's camouflage. Mrs. Stein actually spends summers in the Sisyphean search for her prostitute daughter in Los Angeles. These are some of the tales told in Kate Braverman's audacious new story collection. These furious and often hilarious tableaus of American family life remind us of why she has been seducing readers ever since her debut novel Lithium for Medea shook the literary world nearly forty years ago.

A Good Day for Seppuku

Braverman challenges mythological nuclear family roles in her memorable collection of new stories.

Newly arrived at her brother's home in 1960s L.A., teenager Jordan Lerner struggles to deal with her brother's terminal illness, her mother's dalliances with a string of men, and a school where she is considered an outcast.

Wonders of the West

Dropping In; Putting it All Back Together

Written nearly a decade after Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, Kate Braverman's second novel and arguably her chef d’oeuvre, explores the intertwined lives of three women who await absolution and revelation in the bougainvillea- and violence-filled "barrio" of Los Angeles. Frances Ramos is a voluptuous prostitute who flaunts her wealth and is held in high esteem by the local street gangs. Gloria Hernandez is a dutiful young wife and mother—until her husband’s act of betrayal sparks her growing estrangement and fury. Marta Ortega, a prophetic old woman connected viscerally with the forces/elements of nature, nods as past and present mingle and quietly charts the cross-pollenization of her turbulent neighborhood, and of human destiny.

Palm Latitudes

"I was born in rain and I will die in rain," begins Kate Braverman’s The Incantation of Frida K., an imagined life journey of Frida Kahlo. The book opens and closes inside the mind of Frida K., at 46, on her deathbed, taking us through a kaleidoscope of memories and hallucinations where we shiver for two hundred pages on the threshold of life and death, dream and reality, truth and myth. Defiant and uncompromising, Frida bears the wounds of her body and spirit with a stark pride, transcending all limitations, wrapping her senses around the places, events, and conversations in her past. Frida K. interacts from her hospital bed with her mother, sister, Diego, and her nurse. She calls herself a "water woman," navigating into unexplored dimensions of her world, leading us through the alleys of San Francisco’s Chinatown, of Paris in 1939 (where she rubbed shoulders with André Breton), and of her neighborhood in Mexico City, Coyoacan. Her voyage is an inward one, an incantation before dying. In The Incantation of Frida K., Braverman’s language dances and spins. She carves out a bold interpretation of the life of an artist to whom she is vitally connected.

Kate Braverman

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