<p>“This is the story of Anselm.” A woman plans to set down a faithful portrait of her ex-lover, just days after he’s fled their one-room romance. But as she looks back on the crash-and-burn affair, her writing quickly reveals her own contempt for and obsession with moody, unpredictable Anselm. The 35-year-old narrator is an unpublished writer and retail clerk who spends her working hours shelving in a downtown bookstore, her days off laying low in a Brooklyn luncheonette. Anselm is a charming but hapless recent New Yorker, composer of music, and an Ivy League drop-out who hails from a disastrous Appalachian childhood. His storyline is heartbreaking, yet the fallible narrator goes in and out of sympathy for him as she vacillates between telling his story and theirs. In a voice that evokes the melancholy of Jean Rhys and the frankness of Annie Ernaux, Watch the Doors As They Close recounts the intense affair as it disintegrates--all the while painting vivid scenes of American rural poverty and New York bohemia at the turn of the Millennium.</p>

Watch The Doors As They Close

Literature & Fiction

Lillis, Karen

Literary

Meeting Eyes Bindery

Fiction. The story begins when Elizabeth encounters Beth, her new neighbor and coworker, whose resilience and originality awaken a memory of a younger self. THE SECOND ELIZABETH is a densely poetic meditation on love and language, Virginia and virginity, loss and longing, trauma and recovery. In lush, obsessive text the novel reveals the bonds of female experience, the politics of naming, and the sensuality of nature. As in her novel I, SCORPION (2000) Lillis uses the device of a double to great effect, to describe the nuances and contradictions of a woman's experience. "Karen E. Lillis writes with a cadence and a rhythm that are hypnotic...[The Second Elizabeth] celebrates what my theologian father called `the mystery in the ordinary" Eckhard Gerdes, Journal of Experimental Fiction.

The Second Elizabeth

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Six Gallery Press

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