Stuff
Product Details
Free Press, February 2010
Hardcover, 288 pages
ISBN-10: 1439153213
ISBN-13: 9781439153215
Description
AS A YOUNG WOMAN, Tilly flees home for the hollow underworld of Nevada, looking for pure souls and finding nothing but bad habits. One day, after Tilly has spent nearly thirty years without a family, drinking herself to the brink of death, her niece Stella—who has been leading her own life of empty promise in New York City—arrives on the doorstep of Tilly's desert trailer. The Gin Closet unravels the strange and powerful intimacy that forms between them. With an uncanny ear for dialogue and a witty, unflinching candor about sex, love, and power, Leslie Jamison reminds us that no matter how unexpected its turns, the life we're given is all we have: the cruelties that unhinge us, the beauties that clarify us, the addictions that deform us, those fleeting possibilities of grace that fade as quickly as they come. The Gin Closet marks the debut of a stunning new talent in fiction.
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Browse Inside The Gin Closet"Life is raw in Leslie Jamison's astonishing first novel, a story of love and ruin in the American West…it is a book that finds beauty in dysfunction--and, in doing so, gives us one of the truest and most devastating depictions of alcoholism to be had in some time…The Gin Closet is nothing short of a tour de force."
--Buffalo News
--Buffalo News
-- Buffalo News
"Keenly felt...Redemption, finds Jamison, like love, is rarely pure or unambiguous."
-- Vogue
"keenly frames the emotional mysteries of recovering alcoholic Tilly Rudolph and her niece Stella...Jamison's voice is resoundingly unique, her prose both raw and precise, fully attuned to poetry without ever rescinding an energetic narrative impulse...Of particular importance is the onlique beauty and taut sensuality of Jamison's language and imagery...Jamison is not just marching to the beat of her own drum. She is banging out a brutal, ecstatic symphony upon it. The Gin Closet dares readers to understand how and why we abrade our bodies, ourselves, to manifest the incommunicable to one another." - Nora Nahid Khan, New Haven Advocate
"The Gin Closet is no escapist fantasy but a slow and steady heartbreak. It is also exquisitely beautiful. Jamison writes like a poet, her imagery breathtaking, her sentences unfurling unpredictably, to the novel's devastating end." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Leslie Jamison seems intent on finding the beauty behind loss and desperation...Jamison is no coward, that's for sure. Like Mary Gaitskill, she writes courageously about disease, sex and perils of the flesh without flinching...brave and bracing."—Time Out New York
"...a brutally honest protrait of a woman in crisis...Anyone who has dealt with alcoholism in their own family will no doubt recognize this battle...The Gin Closet will make you more emphathetic to the people in your lives."- Bookchickdi
Huffington Post, May 9, 2011
...library, giving us their recommendations for the perfect reading material on a variety of topics. This week, author Leslie Jamison, whose gorgeous and intense debut novel The Gin Closet finally came out in paperback this week, suggests her ...
Huffington Post, May 9, 2011
...library, giving us their recommendations for the perfect reading material on a variety of topics. This week, author Leslie Jamison, whose gorgeous and intense debut novel The Gin Closet finally came out in paperback this week, suggests her ...
Stranger, February 5, 2010
...grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.) Who's your date today? The Gin Closet, by Leslie Jamison. Where'd you go? I Love New York Deli on Roosevelt. What'd you eat? I had the Empire State, a ...
