MJCCA Book Fest In Your Living Room Live Presents Francine Prose in conversation with Holly Firfer - The Vixen Virtual Event

MJCCA Book Fest In Your Living Room Live Presents Francine Prose in conversation with Holly Firfer - The Vixen Virtual Event

Monday, Aug 23, 2021 8:00 PM

Location:
Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta on Zoom

Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose returns with a dazzling new novel set in the glamorous world of 1950s New York publishing, the story of a young man tasked with editing a steamy bodice-ripper based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—an assignment that will reveal the true cost of entering that seductive, dangerous new world. 

The Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta welcomes Prose for a discussion with Atlanta media personality Holly Firfer of her new book, “The Vixen,” on Monday, August 23, 2021, at 8 PM (EST).

This program is presented in partnership with the National JCC Literary Consortium.

Tickets options are as follows: 

-Admit one for $6 (does not include a copy of the book); or 

-Admit one for $36 (includes a hardcover copy of “The Vixen.” Price covers shipping.) 

All books will be shipped after the event. Please note that USPS is experiencing delays due to the pandemic. Mailed packages may arrive several days later than usual.

About the Book

It’s 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island. 

But Simon’s first assignment—editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the firm’s failing finances—makes him question the cost of admission. Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg’s. His parents mourn Ethel’s death.

Simon’s dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen’s author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. As mysteries deepen, as the confluence of sex, money, politics and power spirals out of Simon’s control, he must face what he’s lost by exchanging the loving safety of his middle-class Jewish parents’ Coney Island apartment for the witty, whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic boss, the legendary Warren Landry. Gradually Simon realizes that the people around him are not what they seem, that everyone is keeping secrets, that ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot—and that these crises may steer him toward a brighter future. 

At once domestic and political, contemporary and historic, funny and heartbreaking, enlivened by surprising plot turns and passages from Anya’s hilariously bad novel, ”The Vixen” illuminates a period of history with eerily striking similarities to the current moment. Meanwhile it asks timeless questions: How do we balance ambition and conscience? What do social mobility and cultural assimilation require us to sacrifice? How do we develop an authentic self, discover a vocation, and learn to live with the mysteries of love, family, art, life and loss?

About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-one works of fiction including, the highly acclaimed ”Mister Monkey”; the New York Times bestseller ”Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932”; ”A Changed Man,” which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and ”Blue Angel,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised ”Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife,” and the New York Times bestseller ”Reading Like a Writer,” which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.