Tamara Faith Berger

Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012) Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013) Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida - a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian musician who seduces her at the edge of the tourist zone. Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive and violent woman with a strange power over him. Myra and her family return to an unnamed, middle-class, grey Canadian city and she falls in with a pot-smoking, intellectual anarchist crowd. When Gayl and Elijah travel north and infiltrate Myra's life, she walks willingly into their world: Myra continues to experiment sexually with Elijah, while Gayl plays an integral part in the increasingly abject games. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl's self-consciousness. How does a girl feel scared? What is she scared of? And how does telling yourself not to be scared really work? As Myra enters worlds unfamiliar of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself.

Maidenhead

Yara

Two novels, two young women at the frontiers of sex. Like a series of Penthouse letters penned by Kathy Acker, Lie With Me recounts a woman's sexual escapades, picking up random men in bars for a series of increasingly extreme encounters, hoping to understand love from the far side of sluttiness. In The Way of the Whore, Mira, an introverted Jewish girl obsessed with Jean Genet, allows herself to be seduced by the sex industry, determined to find meaning in her tormented relationships with cruel men. Tamara Faith Berger's first two novels have been languishing out of print. They were scandalous when they were first published; substantially revised and returned to print, they're just as titillating and troubling now. "Treading a line between sublime experimentation and unsettling honesty, Little Cat rides a wave of female sexual energy. . . . 'Please, I want you to stay with me till it's over,' the narrator of 'Lie With Me' begs. With writing this good, it's hard not to.' – Quill & Quire Praise for Tamara Faith Berger's Maidenhead (winner of the 2012 Believer Book Award): "Myra's confusion, her passion, her need for possession and to be possessed, make this novel an incredible read, finding its place, as Sheila Heti (who should know) wrote, 'somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild and Michel Foucault.'" – Flavorwire "There are no easy moments, no comfort to be found in the searing prose. . . . When writers get young female sexuality right, stories become a revelation and such is the case with Maidenhead. The writing pulls the reader desperately close." – Roxane Gay, The Rumpus Tamara Faith Berger is the author of three novels, including Maidenhead. Lie With Me has been made into a film.

Little Cat

In this small format erotic Orlando, an unnamed woman narrates her life of lust while unnamed men describe their erotic encounters with her from their perspectives. Like Teiresias, the blind seer who has been both man and woman, we experience both sides of this dizzying story - a rhapsodic examination of love, degradation, hatred and desire, as well as a parody of the pornographic imagination that informs it. Part Jean Genet, part Molly Bloom, part Penthouse Forum, Lie With Me is a disturbing, arousing love story - and the work of an original, uncompromising new talent.

Lie with Me

The first two novels by Tamara Faith Berger, acclaimed author of Maidenhead — they're every shade of dirty.

It's just another boring summer for our teenaged narrator — until Barbra arrives. An Ethiopian Jew, Barbra was brought to Israel at age five, a part of Operation Solomon, and now our narrator's well-intentioned father has brought her, as a teen, to their home for the summer. But Barbra isn't the docile and grateful orphan they expect, and soon our narrator, terrified of her and drawn to her in equal measure, finds himself immersed in compulsive psychosexual games with her, as she binge-drinks and lies to his family. Things go terribly wrong, and Barbra flees. But seven years later, as our narrator is getting his life back on track, with a new girlfriend and a master's degree in Holocaust Studies underway, Barbra shows up at our narrator's house once again, her "spiritual teacher" in tow, and our narrator finds his politics, and his sanity, back in question. Queen Solomon is another masterful take on the politics of sex, race, and power from the author of the Believer Book Award–winning Maidenhead.

Tamara Faith Berger

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