When Roz Rosenzweig meets Edwin Anderson fumbling for keys on the stoop of a Manhattan walk-up, the last thing on her mind is falling for a polite Nebraskan–yet fall for him she does. So begins Thisbe Nissen’s breathtaking debut novel, a decidedly urban fairy tale that follows Roz and Edwin as they move from improbable courtship to marriage to the birth of daughter Miranda–the locus of all Roz’s attention, anxiety, and often smothering affection. As Miranda comes of age and begins to chafe against the intensity of her mother’s neurotic love, Roz must do her best to let those she cherishes move into the world without her. On crowded subways, in strange bedrooms, at Bar Mitzvahs, in brownstone basements and high school gymnasiums, Nissen’s unforgettable characters make their hilarious and wrenching way–and prove, indeed, that good things thrive in New York City.
Author
Thisbe Nissen is the author of three novels, Our Lady of the Prairie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), Osprey Island (Knopf, 2004), The Good People of New York (Knopf, 2001), and a story collection, Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night (University of Iowa Press, 1999, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award). She is also the co-author with Erin Ergenbright of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook, a collection of stories, recipes, and art collages. Her fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, Seventeen, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and anthologized in The Iowa Award: The Best Stories 1991-2000 and Best American Mystery Stories. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, Preservation and The Believer, and is featured in several essay anthologies. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the James Michener-Copernicus Society, The University of Iowa, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, and was the 19th Zale Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University. She has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Brandeis University, The New School's Eugene Lang College and in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University. These days, she teaches undergrad, MFA and PhD students at Western Michigan University. She and her husband, Jay Baron Nicorvo, are parents of two rescue cats, many sprightly chickens, and one intriguing human child. They dream, one day, of raising goats.
