A brilliant book of poetry by a legendary American author.

Lullaby for Sinners: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Braverman, Kate

Poetry

HARPER & ROW. NY 1980

Tells the stories of Francisca Ramos, a prostitute, Gloria Hernandez, a young housewife, and Marta Ortega, an elderly halfbreed, who live in the Los Angeles barrio

Palm Latitudes (Contemporary American Fiction)

United States

Penguin??Books

Lithium for Medea

Lithium for Medea is as much a tale of addictionâ€”to sex, drugs, and dysfunctional family chainsâ€”as it is one of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Here is the story according to Roseâ€”the daughter of a narcissistic, emotionally crippled mother and a father who shadowboxes with death in hospital corridorsâ€”as she slips deeply and dangerously into the lair of a cocaine-fed artist in the bohemian squalor of Venice. Lithium for Medea sears us with Roseâ€™s breathless, fierce, visceral flightâ€”like a drug that leaves oneâ€™s perceptions forever altered.

Literary

Single mothers, insolent daughters, blood sisters, and desperate friends people the tales in this twelve-story cycle, as they live out urban fairy tales and nightmares in the atmospheric landscape of Los Angeles

Squandering the Blue

Fawcett Columbine

Newly arrived at her brother's home in 1960s Los Angeles, teenager Jordan Lerner struggles to deal with her brother's terminal illness, her mother's dalliances with a string of men, and a school where she is considered an outcast

Wonders of the West

Fawcett

In this startling, intense novel, Kate Braverman uses the language and sensibilities of a poet to create a portrait of a young woman on the brink of self-discovery.

Pinnacle Books

Tells the stories of Francisca Ramos, a prostitute, Gloria Hernandez, a young housewife, and Marta Ortega, an eldery halfbreed, who live in the Los Angeles barrio

Palm Latitudes

Linden Press

Ivy Books

Haunting new stories about girls on the brink of adulthood, women on the verge of breakdowns, and families undone by past deceptions.
 "Kate Braverman is a writer of astonishing versatility and lyricism. Her stories are brilliantly rendered, painfully intimate portraits of individuals who come alive on the page as if illuminated by strobe lighting. With remarkable precision she tracks the restless motions of a mind searching for its reflection in the world—a continuous interrogation of the self that sweeps us along with it, as in a mysterious adventure."—Joyce Carol Oates
"If fame did not find Braverman when the moment was right, perhaps it will make amends now that the moment is wrong. . . . Braverman excels at flooding readers in images that throb with menace or pleasure, as if descriptive language were a vein into which our most primal fears and desires could be injected."—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
"The book feels timeless, think Transparent, sans the trans . . . Kate Braverman, an underground literary icon through decades of razor-sharp writing, returns with a gorgeously observed collection of stories about contemporary Jewish identity. It's profound, realistic, and funny in equal measure."—David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
"Braverman daringly, ravishingly, and resoundingly dramatizes the profound consequences of delusions, lies, ignorance, anger, cruelty, poverty, disappointment, conformity, inebriation, and violence with high imagination, sensual precision, cutting humor, and bracing insight."—Donna Seaman, Booklist *Starred review
"Braverman writes forthright but beautiful sentences. Her details are so vivid that they feel like memories . . . "—Publishers Weekly, *Starred/Boxed review
 "Kate Braverman is an original. Reading her is like hitching a ride on a runaway train, always dangerous, always thrilling, always a knockout. Seppuku is all that and more."—Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake
"Braverman is the godmother of literary bad girls and a connoisseur of the shattered beauty glittering in the wreckage of her characters' lives. A Good Day for Seppuku celebrates the Braverman vision, and frames her legacy."—Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M.
A thirteen-year-old girl must choose between her mother in Beverly Hills or her pot-growing father in the Allegheny Mountains. Dr. Bernie Roth and his wife Chloe reside in a grand hacienda in La Jolla. Their children are in college, and their disappointments are profound. But Bernie has his doctor's bag of elixirs for the regrets of late middle age. Mrs. Barbara Stein, a high school teacher, looks like she'd sacrifice her life for Emily Dickinson's honor. That's camouflage. Mrs. Stein actually spends summers in the Sisyphean search for her prostitute daughter in Los Angeles.
These are some of the tales told in Kate Braverman's audacious new story collection. These furious and often hilarious tableaus of American family life remind us of why she has been seducing readers ever since her debut novel Lithium for Medea shook the literary world nearly forty years ago.

A Good Day for Seppuku: Stories

City Lights Publishers

The indigo skies and lush vegetation of the contemporary West Coast belie the damaged souls and desperate alienation that lurk behind fading stucco walls and off the endless highways. The lives of women on the edge and beyond the margins have seldom been explored with as much power or insight as in these brilliant stories by award-winning novelist and poet Kate Braverman. In a world without succor, Braverman’s characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The protagonist of "Pagan Night" waits with her unnamed and unwanted infant in a shabby zoo in Idaho while her partner buys dope and makes plans to reconstitute their failed rock band. And the precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has so enjoyed. Abandonment, in these wrenching stories, comes in many forms, and freedom is elusive and sometimes fraught with pain and terror. Braverman’s language is ripe, intense, as vivid as the sun-drenched California landscape, and her characters are contrary, unpredictable, and unforgettable. These haunting stories evoke the glittering expectations and shattering disappointments of the postmodern West.

Small Craft Warnings: Stories (Western Literature and Fiction Series)

University of Nevada Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Braverman, Kate. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Braverman, Kate

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Braverman, Kate. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lullaby for Sinners: Poems

Palm Latitudes (Contemporary American Fiction)

Lithium for Medea

Squandering the Blue

Wonders of the West

Lithium for Medea

Palm Latitudes

Squandering the Blue

A Good Day for Seppuku: Stories

Small Craft Warnings: Stories (Western Literature and Fiction Series)