Worthy: A Novel - Softcover

"Worthy, a free-ranging Eastern European in the West, is among the most memorable characters I have ever encountered in literature... An astonishing, brilliant book."
--Kelly Cherry, author of Twelve Women in a Country Called America: Stories

"Worthy will entrance anyone with the pirouette and yearning of a reinvented English, the unrelenting gaze of a storyteller whose capacity for new lives is remarkable. Lisa Birnbaum's novel is a strange tapestry of comic and heartbreaking magic."
--Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here

"In Lisa Birnbaum's Worthy, once we climb aboard the angular poetry of Ludmila's acquired language, her story claims us with its vivid parade of tribulations ... She is a heroine worthy of the old school--retaining her stamina and optimism as she confronts every obstacle in her American education."
--Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine

Worthy is told in imperfect but inventive English by Ludmilaor Worthy, as she comes to be knowna retired” con artist from Eastern Europe managing an eccentric, failing strip club in Tampa for her lover, Leo. Though there is much she won’t reveal, she gradually weaves the story of her love affair twenty years earlier with Theodore, an erratic literature professor who embraces an ideology built around what he calls the Four Books: Mann’sConfessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, Nabokov’s Despair, Melville’sThe Confidence-Man, and Camus’s The Fall. Seduced by the scofflaws in these novels, Theodore and Worthy transform themselves into confidence artists, a tempest of shared madness that carries them from New York to Mexico City to the South of France. Yet Worthy’s narrative leaves the listener with more questions than answers, from what happened to Theodore to the reasons she abandoned her young son Mirek in Montana, and why his pursuit is now haunting her.

With the linguistic acrobatics of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and the confessional force ofThe Fall, Lisa Birnbaum weaves a tale of deception, invention, and love lost and left behind, where even language is unreliable.