Daphne Merkin

A classic true-crime memoir of the murder of Berkeley student Roberta Lee in 1984, written by her close friend, desperate for justice. Gripping, heartbreaking, and full of details about the investigation, the book is also a portrait of a generation. Roberta Lee, a Berkeley student of unusual promise, went running one Sunday in November 1984 with her lover, Bradley Page. He came back alone. Roberta, sometimes volatile and moody, had run off on her own, he said. When she failed to return, one of the largest missing-person searches in California history was launched. Five weeks later, her battered body was found on a bed of branches in a shallow grave. Within hours, Page had confessed to the murder of Roberta Lee--and then recanted. The story of the dead girl had begun. Melanie Thernstrom, a brilliant writer and poet, was Roberta's closest friend. In this haunting, multi-layered memoir, she has written a heart-breaking tribute, both elegy and celebration, to her lost friend. With unflinching honesty and infinite grace, Thernstrom attempts to make sense of a death fundamentally nonsensical: weaving together news clippings and old photographs, Roberta's letters and her own recollections, she reconstructs the horrific crime, the agonizing search for the body, the trial and its wrenching, explosive climax. Through the filter of memory, Roberta herself--gifted, fiercely intelligent, yearning for love--is rendered achingly alive, and Thernstrom offers a powerful and deeply personal account of grief, as well as a raw-nerved portrait of a generation for whom the future is uncertain and threatening. With its enduring themes of innocence and evil, truth and uncertainty, tangled human motives and feelings, The Dead Girl is a complex exploration of the nature of reality and the frail, shifting, suspect ways in which we respond to it. In her stubborn refusal to let her dead friend be forgotten, Melanie Thernstrom has created a superb collage of memory, loss, and redemption.

His first new collection of short humor in fifteen years is classic Woody Allen. Zero Gravity is the fifth collection of comic pieces by Woody Allen, a hilarious prose stylist whose enduring appeal readers have savored since his classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, Side Effects, and Mere Anarchy. This new work combines pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker along with ten written exclusively for this book, each a comic inspiration. Whether he’s writing about horses that paint, cars that think, the sex lives of celebrities, or how General Tso’s Chicken got its name, he is always totally original, broad yet sophisticated, acutely observant, and most important, relentlessly funny. Along with titles like “Buffalo Wings Woncha Come Out Tonight” and “When Your Hood Ornament Is Nietzsche,” included in this collection is his poignant but very funny short story, "Growing Up in Manhattan.”Zero Gravity implies writing not to be taken seriously, but, as with any true humor, not all the laughs are weightless

A novel of unsurpassed candor, punctuated by bold ruminations on love, marriage, family, sex, gender, and relationships, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love depicts one woman’s psychological descent into sexual captivity. This is the story of the extremes to which she will go to achieve erotic bliss and of her struggle to regain her soul. As Daphne Merkin’s audacious new novel opens, a wife and mother looks back at the moment when her life as a young book editor is upended by a casual encounter with an intriguing man who seems to intuit her every thought. Convinced she’s found the one, Judith Stone succumbs to the push and pull of her sexual entanglement with Howard Rose, constantly seeking his attention and approval. That is, until she realises that beneath his erotic obsession with her, Howard is intent on obliterating any sense of self she possesses. As Merkin writes, his was “the allure of remoteness, affection edged in ice.” Escaping Howard’s grasp and her own perverse enjoyment of being under his control will test the limits of Judith’s capacity to resist the siren call of submission. Narrated by Judith in a time before the #MeToo movement, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love charts the persistent hold the past has on us and the way it shapes our present.

A bold, provocative "pioneering novel" (Los Angeles Times) about family, womanhood, and growing up Set on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Enchantment is narrated by Hannah Lehmann, the wry survivor of a troubled childhood. Hannah's perceptions of her Orthodox German Jewish heritage--her five brothers and sisters, the complicated power of families, the madness of money, the obsessive workings of memory itself--are as disquieting in their sharpness as they are lucid in their irony. The world, she finds, is a treacherous place where love is closely knit with pain, but even the limitations of her own point of view are not lost on Hannah. She is all too aware that her perspective is fixed in the vise of her childhood: "My mother," she says, "is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world." This is a novel about what people say when they are talking to themselves; what families look like when they are not observed by others. Provocative, hawkishly observed, and devastating in its reliability, Daphne Merkin's Enchantment is a searing and unforgettable exploration of family and self.

Daphne Merkin has been hospitalised three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalisations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls "the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome." "The opposite of depression," she writes with characteristic insight, "is not a state of unimaginable happiness ... but a state of relative all-right-ness." Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma. • For readers of Andrew Solomon and Ariel Levy • National Indie Bestseller

Daphne Merkin brings her signature combination of wit, candor, and penetrating intelligence to subjects that touch on every aspect of contemporary culture, from the high calling of the literary life to the poignant underside of celebrity and our collective fixation on fame. Merkin's elegant, widely admired profiles go beneath the glossy facades to consider their vulnerabilities and demons, as well as their enduring hold on us. Here one will encounter a gallery of complex, unforgettable celebrities, from Marilyn Monroe to Mike Tyson, and from Courtney Love to Truman Capote. Merkin also offers reflections on writers as varied as Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, John Updike, and Alice Munro. Most of all, though, Merkin is a writer who is not afraid to implicate herself as a participant in our consumerist and overstimulated culture. Merkin helps makes sense of our collective impulses. From a brazenly honest and deeply empathic observer, The Fame Lunches shines a light on truths we often prefer to keep veiled and in doing so opens up the conversation for all of us.

"Lush and uncensored" essays (Village Voice) on spanking during sex, shopping, Martin Scorcese, Israel, breast reduction, Gary Gilmore, depression, and other matters, by "one of the few contemporary essayists who have (and deserve) a following" (New York). "Everything Daphne Merkin writes is so smart, it shines" (Washington Post Book World).