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Still Life with Husband

Part of Vintage Contemporaries

Author Lauren Fox

Paperback

$13.95 US

Knopf | Vintage

5.2"W x 7.94"H x 0.65"D | 9 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Apr 08, 2008 | 320 Pages | 9780307277374

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Meet Emily Ross, thirty years old, married to her college sweetheart, and personal advocate for cake at breakfast time. Meet Emily's husband, Kevin, a sweet technical writer with a passion for small appliances and a teary weakness for Little Women. Enter David, a sexy young reporter with longish floppy hair and the kind of face Emily feels the weird impulse to lick. In this captivating novel of marriage and friendship, Lauren Fox explores the baffling human heart and the dangers of getting what you wish for.

LAUREN FOX, who earned her M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, is the author of the novels Days of Awe, Still Life with Husband, and Friends Like Us. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Marie Claire, Parenting, Psychology Today, The Rumpus, and Salon. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband and two daughters.

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In the middle of the night I don’t know who he is, this man lying next to me, his leg brushing against my leg, arm draped over my hip. And that’s when I want him. I keep my eyes closed and turn toward him, stroking him softly, fingers skimming over his chest, his thighs, feathery touches light enough to wake up just the parts that matter. He responds, and we both know what to do, how not to talk, not even to whisper, letting our bodies move together in the dark. This is a man I picked up in a bar; this is a man whose name I don’t know; this is searing, anonymous sex with a stranger, and I’m using all of my senses and none of my heart. He rolls on top of me, heavy and hard, not kissing, hot hands all over me. I grab a condom from my night table and hand it to him.“Emily,” he whispers, crashing rudely into my dream, breaking the rules of 2:00 a.m. sex. “Please?”“No,” I say, my eyes still closed, arching toward him now in spite of myself. “Shhh.” I know what he wants, and I’m not prepared to give it to him.“Baby,” he breathes, and I open my eyes to the face of my husband hovering over mine, earnest and needy, the man I have known since college, the man I share a bathroom with, the man who cried during Little Women, who thinks I don’t know that he plucks his nose hairs, who’s afraid of raisins because they remind him of mouse droppings. “Baby,” he whispers again, and I sigh, fully here now, fully awake and resigned to it. And this is how we finish, knowing everything about each other, completely together, naked and silent and half-satisfied in the middle of the night.

“A delightful new voice in American fiction, a voice that instantly recalls the wry, knowing prose of Lorrie Moore crossed with the screwball talents of the cartoonist Roz Chast.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times“Any woman who's ever found herself looking at her life and wondering how on earth she wound up there will relate to the characters in this funny, honest novel.” —Jodi Picoult, author of Nineteen Minutes “Fox gives us an all-too-real glance into what most married people have at one time or another wondered about (if not acted upon): the thrill-ride of illicit love. Emily's first-person narrative may be laugh-out-loud funny, but it's also an honest, compassionate look at the heartbreak of misplaced intimacy.” —Amy Woods Butler, St. Louis Post-Dispatch“Read Still Life with Husband for its funny, winning voice and an ending that could be debated by book clubs for months to come.” —Ann Oldenburg, USA Today

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