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Showing posts from May, 2014

An Indie rock star gets the tour of her life in WONDERLAND, a story about an artist's come-back

In WONDERLAND by Stacey D'Erasmo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2014) Anna Brundage is caught between her rock n'roll desire and a hard-won security. At 44, she's a knock-out, tall and thin with long red hair and huge sensitivity. Anna is attuned to the essence of  places and people, whether Janus-faced, loving, limited or something else entirely. She comes by this perception, and the habit of sifting reality, from her father, an art world immortal, whose family's life was an itinerant journey from one country to another, one site to the next, as he made art by destroying derelict buildings. When Anna inherits a piece of his rubble, a valuable relic of this mythic man, she's given the means for a second chance. Anna, who had several albums, walked away from fame for seven years. Now she lives in a tiny but enviably cheap apartment in Manhattan and teaches carpentry at a girl's school. Besides the apartment, she's got an amiable ex-husband, colleagues and