The Center of Things (Ballantine Reader's Circle). Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Center of Things (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

“A JOLLY READ–McPhee’s characters are wonderfully weird. . . . Romance mingles with mind-swelling musings on superclusters and string theory. . . . The end equation is an elegant inquiry into the randomness of love and the glory of fate.”
–Entertainment Weekly

As a reporter for New York’s last evening tabloid, Marie Brown writes about the bizarre and the scandalous. But her life is hardly either. She’s too single, too tall, and too pragmatic for anything other than her routine–which consists of going to work and going to the library, where she indulges in her one passion, physics, and in conversations with Marco Trentadue, the strange “freelance intellectual” in blue pajamas. Then the trajectory of her life takes an unexpected turn.

Nora Mars–glamour girl, star of stage and screen–is near death. Marie has worshipped Nora since she was in high school. Naturally she will write Nora’s obit. When Marie meets Nora’s charismatic third ex-husband for an interview, she struggles between a reporter’s integrity and plain old lust. What Marie uncovers is a story of a starlet who took the exigencies of fame into her own hands–and the inspiration to do the same with her own love life.

Jenny McPhee is the coauthor with her sisters Martha and Laura of Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits. She is the translator of Paolo Maurensig’s Canone Inverso and co-translator of Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II. Her short stories have been published in many literary reviews including Glimmer Train, Zoetrope, and Brooklyn Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum.


From the Hardcover edition.