A Thousand And One Nights - Softcover

?A one-of-a-kind book, fascinating and honest. ?Joan Silber, author of National Book Award Finalist Ideas of Heaven

Newly hired as an entertainer aboard the MS Sound of Music, twenty-two-year-old Karla is thrilled to find herself living a surreal and shmaltzy cruise-ship existence?musical reviews by night, shuffleboard tournaments by day, and a growing romantic and professional alliance with a charming Brit named Jack. Karla is less than thrilled, four years later, to discover she s become a lounge-singer cliché. As she and Jack, now a duo, crank out pop song after pop song in a luxury hotel bar in Shanghai, Karla struggles to makes sense of their partnership and their bizarre expatriate experiences. But a thousand and one nights of faking it have begun to take their toll. Funny, fast-paced, and incisive, A Thousand and One Nights captures the performances, large and small, we use to make it through life.

?A compelling tour of the ersatz, dismally funny, and faintly depressing world of the third-tier entertainer: a tour that s beautifully understated in its emotional intelligence, and wry and clear-eyed and psychologically astute in its portrait of a young couple . . . This is a moving and accomplished first novel. ?Jim Shephard, author of Project X

LARA TUPPER received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. This is her first book. She lives in New York.