Bøger af Jen Silverman

'As funny as it's intellectual, this page-turner about crashing and burning is spot-on about ambition, infatuation, theatre, film, ethics, teens, and everything else.' Emma Donoghue, author of Room 'Witty...Earnest...Laugh-out-loud...Pitch-perfect' New York TimesIn the pursuit of fame, how do you know when you've gone too far?When Cass - a thirty-something, promising, queer playwright - receives a prestigious award, it seems as though her career is finally taking off. That is until she finds herself at the centre of a searing public shaming, which relegates her from rising star in New York to a nobody on her best friend's sofa in L.A. As she comes to terms with the extent of her failure, she is forced to question who she is without the thing that has always defined her: her art. So she fills the days by stalking her playwright nemesis, of whom she is excruciatingly envious, and getting pulled into the orbit of the charismatic but manipulative filmmaker next door. As Cass becomes increasingly involved with her neighbour and the group of pugilistic teenage girls she's documenting, Cass begins to dream of a comeback. But when the film spins dangerously out of control, Cass is once again forced to reckon with her ambition, and her rage.We Play Ourselves is a darkly funny novel about the cost of making art, and the art of making enemies. 'Funny, sharp, modern - this is an excellent debut novel. Its bold, edgy, strange heroine has adventures and misadventures, screws up again and again, but somehow won my love. I couldn't put this book down.' Weike Wang, PEN/Hemingway-award winning author of Chemistry

"Minnow Hunter has always tried to lead the life her single father Christopher modeled--private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when a split-second decision makes her the extremely public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. She even loses the support of her father, who stops speaking to her when the media start harassing him, too. Overwhelmed, Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris, hoping distance and time will let her start over. But what if Christopher wasn't always the restrained, conservative man he appears? What if he has a troubled and tragic past that he has taken great pains to bury--from the world and from his daughter?"--

A charming devil arrives in the quiet village of Edmonton to bargain for the souls of its residents in exchange for their darkest wishes. Elizabeth should be his easiest target, having been labeled a "witch" and cast out by the town, but her soul is not so readily bought. As the devil returns to convince her - and then returns again - unexpected passions flare, alliances are formed, and the village is forever changed. An inventive retelling of a Jacobean drama, this sharp, subversive fable debates how much our souls are worth when hope is hard to come by.

After a humiliating scandal, a young writer flees to the West Coast, where she is drawn into the morally ambiguous orbit of a charismatic filmmaker and the teenage girls who are her next subjects.FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “A blistering story about the costs of creating art.”—O: The Oprah MagazineNot too long ago, Cass was a promising young playwright in New York, hailed as “a fierce new voice” and “queer, feminist, and ready to spill the tea.” But at the height of all this attention, Cass finds herself at the center of a searing public shaming, and flees to Los Angeles to escape—and reinvent herself. There she meets her next-door neighbor Caroline, a magnetic filmmaker on the rise, as well as the pack of teenage girls who hang around her house. They are the subjects of Caroline’s next semidocumentary movie, which follows the girls’ clandestine activity: a Fight Club inspired by the violent classic.   As Cass is drawn into the film’s orbit, she is awed by Caroline’s ambition and confidence. But over time, she becomes troubled by how deeply Caroline is manipulating the teens in the name of art—especially as the consequences become increasingly disturbing. With her past proving hard to shake and her future one she’s no longer sure she wants, Cass is forced to reckon with her own ambitions and confront what she has come to believe about the steep price of success.

"Jen Silverman's poems are baptisms of desire. They've traveled the world and come back to tell you the pleasure to be found there, the holes of each leaving, the way it is all 'drenched in light and wine.' Economical in syntax and generous in image, Bath astonishes at every turn with its heart, its wisdom, its waters."- Traci Brimhall, author of our lady of the ruins"I have a crush on Jen Silverman's language. This multi-hyphenate wordsmith writes poetry that sings with silver fish scales, bathes in love, hopes for redemption. I'll read with ardor anything Silverman writes, in any genre." - Sarah Ruhl, playwright of Eurydice

"...Five absurdist, hilarious, provocative plays exploring everything from power to loneliness to menstruating hippos. The collection contains: Real American Dinner Party - Sometimes you lose your keys, sometimes you lose your temper, and sometimes you lose the most unexpected of things. A particularly tense dinner party can change everything in the blink of an eye; Hippos of the Eastern Enclosure - On Thanksgiving, a nervous male zookeeper is overwhelmed by three female hippos, who all get their periods. While the zookeeper, his girlfriend, and his co-worker decide who is on clean-up, the hippos interrogate the nature of ambition; The Visitations - Dana has been alone in her home for a bit too long. Either she is losing it or she is having an increasingly intimate relationship with a ghost.; Ubu Anew (A Play for Strange People) - A shortened and extremely loose adaptation of Ubu Roi, featuring Pixy Stix and Hillary Clinton; Your Mother in the Night Sky - Your mother leaves a voicemail, the strangest voicemail you've ever received." --

Reading like a cross between Shelia Heti's How Should A Person Be? and Lily King's Writers & Lovers, We Play Ourselves is a wildly entertaining debut novel of female rage, self-sabotage, the pursuit of fame and the costs of artistic ambition.

Wink follows unhappy housewife Sofie and her breadwinning husband, Gregor, who both seek weekly counseling from an unorthodox therapist, Doctor Frans. Their current topic of disagreement: the cat, Wink. When Wink goes missing, violent desires, domestic anarchy, and feline vengeance emerge, threatening the neatly ordered reality Sophie, Gregor, and Doctor Frans have constructed.

Betty is rich; Betty is lonely; Betty's busy working on her truck; Betty wants to talk about love, but Betty needs to hit something. And Betty keeps using a small hand mirror to stare into parts of herself she's never examined. Five different women named Betty collide at the intersection of anger, sex, and the "thea-tah."

Sharon, in her mid-fifties, is recently divorced and needs a roommate to share her Iowa home. Robyn, also in her mid-fifties, needs a place to hide and a chance to start over. But as Sharon begins to uncover Robyn's secrets, they encourage her own deep-seated desire to transform her life completely. A dark comedy about what it takes to re-route your life - and what happens when the wheels come off.

Two sisters and a dog live out their lives on the bleak English moors, dreaming of love and power. The arrival of a hapless governess and a moor-hen set all three on a strange and dangerous path. The Moors is a dark comedy about love, desperation, and visibility.