Bigfoot Dreams (Contemporary American Fiction) - Softcover

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen novels, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prose is a highly regarded critic and essayist, and has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, and she lives in New York City.

You can walk into Vera Perl's Brooklyn apartment house and pick her out of a clutch of tenants: you will recognize her charged, speculative voice. She writes for a yellow rag called This Week, thinks in absurd, alliterative headlines and tailors her made-up stories to photographs taken as if by chance by her colleague Solomon. The fun begins when Solomon snaps two kids selling lemonade on a lawn in Flatbush, and Vera endows them with names and a psychiatrist father, and the water used in the lemonade with astonishing curative qualitiesall of which, except possibly the last, turns out to be true. The paper is slapped with a lawsuit, Vera is fired, her estranged husband Lowell flies in from Los Angeles for a night of love and leaves several days later with their daughter Rosalie. This gives Vera the chance, via a Cryptobiological Society meeting at the Grand Canyon, to pursue her dreams of the eponymous Bigfoot, a monster whose footprints are the size of bathtubs and whose arms shatter buildings with a single swipe. Prose's (Hungry Hearts account of these high jinks conveys every scene with psychedelic gusto, an authenticity of language and setting, and an acute sense of character. This is a lollapalooza of a novel, which keeps the reader hanging on every word and conjures believing out of make-believe.
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