"It's truly powerful, and acrid, and barbed, and filled with wonderful, and unexpected, turns of phrase and above all it's shocking in its directness and understated anger and sadness and fear… it's an amazing piece of writing."—Cynthia Ozick Imagine being told before the age of forty that because you have an ovarian cyst, the surgeon wants to take out the "whole kit and caboodle." Imagine being told that "because you already have your children, "who needs all that?" Why not "keep the playground but get rid of the plumbing?" Imagine watching a film strip at the hospital which assures you that though you will no longer have your female organs, you will still have romance in your life and will be "able to waltz the night away with your husband." The Hysterectomy Waltz is a sharp and cynical, funny and tragic comedy, a story of marriage and motherhood under the threat of the knife, a tale of friendship and betrayal.
Author
Prize-winning novelist and short story writer who has published seven novels—among them King Of The World, which won the Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award for an "important and unusual book of literary distinction," and The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for "the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme" — as well as five volumes of short stories, nine young adult novels, and three books of non-fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in literary journals such as The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southwest Review, Shenandoah, The Chattahoochee Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She has published essays in The American Scholar, Commentary, The Sewanee Review, Salmagundi and The Writer. She earned her M.A. in English from Brandeis University and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
