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Almost Famous Women

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
The fascinating lives of the characters in Almost Famous Women have mostly been forgotten, but their stories are burning to be told. Nearly every story in this dazzling collection is based on a woman who attained some celebrity - she raced speed boats or was a conjoined twin in show business; a reclusive painter of renown; a member of the first all-female, integrated swing band. We see Lord Byron's illegitimate daughter, Allegra; Oscar Wilde's troubled niece, Dolly; West With the Night author Beryl Markham; Edna St. Vincent Millay's sister, Norma. These extraordinary stories travel the world, explore the past (and delve into the future), and portray fiercely independent women defined by their acts of bravery, creative impulses, and sometimes reckless decisions.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 23, 2015
      This collection of short stories takes actual women from history and weaves imaginative narratives around them. All of these characters are historical figures “lost to popular memory”—conjoined twins who aspire to show business, a painter who has not put hand to canvas in 40 years, and survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp whose jutting clavicles and hollow eyes are known in haunting photographs. The scope of the book is ambitious, with multiple settings and secondary characters serving as narrators; as a result, the stories in the audio edition are increasingly hard to differentiate. Reader Lockford does a fine job with the range of emotions, from wry detachment to despair to joy. However, she is less skilled at the many accents required by this diverse collection, whose stories require fluidity with German, Kenyan, Eastern European, Bahamian, and many other inflections. Most of these accents do not sound natural or believable. A Scribner hardcover.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 15, 2014
      The conceit for Bergman's second collection (after Birds of a Lesser Paradise) is immediately appealingâshort, punchy sketches of women either completely neglected by popular memory or better known for their association with men. Hence we have Lucia Joyce, daughter of James, in "Expression Theory," Norma Millay occupying the shadow of her sister, Vincent, in "Norma Millay's Film Noir Period," and the steady dissolution of Oscar Wilde's niece in "Who Killed Dolly Wilde?" Bergman's strongest stories concentrate on the historical moments in which her cast of characters (which includes conjoined twins, lady stunt motorcyclists, and smart-mouthed horn players) function as vectors, precisely because these womenâlesbians, artists, and African Americansâremain outsiders in their own era. The larger-than-life boat racer "Joe" Carstairs makes her private island into a refuge for lost souls in "The Siege At Whale Cay"; the painter Romaine Brooks shuns even her servants in "Romain Remains"; and Butterfly McQueen repudiates both God and her most famous role, the maid from Gone With the Wind, in "Saving Butterfly McQueen." But for all its veneration for these women, the collection becomes repetitiveâtoo many devoted friends narrating the story of their doomed and famous peers, too many aging burnt-out dames and, overall, too little access to the actual voice and psychology of its heroines. Still, even with weaker entries like the redundant Shirley Jackson impression "The Lottery, Redux," the collection is worth it for its feminist reclamation of the narrative thatâfor exampleâcelebrates Byron and forgets his abandoned daughter.

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  • English

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