More Books by Fredrica Wagman
Mrs. Hornstien
Her name was Mrs. Hornstien and she lived in a palatial apartment high over Rittenhouse Square that had the whole zodiac in the vaulted ceiling in the library, white marble stairs, mahogany walls, and in every room huge pieces of enormous sculpture and gigantic paintings in heavy carved gold wooden frames with little brass lights on top of them, making the whole enormous place a maze of posh old-world glamour. It was a rich I had never I had never seen the likes of, but then I was only seventeen years old that night, so I hadn't seem much of anything as I stood next to her son, staring at her...
Within this elegantly drawn arc of natural succession, Wagman gathers with unsparing honesty more than one lifetime's worth of wisdom about women's lives and human experience. And standing stalwartly at the center of this pageant is the unforgettable figure of Mrs. Hornstien - a formidable being whose huge heart is, nonetheless, more than capable of being broken.
Magic Man, Magic Man
A fantasy for adults, an imaginative reconstruction of marriages, love affairs and a psychoanalysis. These are some posssible readings of Fredrica Wagman's novel, in which a woman tells of childhood with her mother, the death of her father, her later expeiences in college, her obsessions with food, and her sexual explorations. Her first marriage at seventeen was to a boy her parents despised. Her second, soon after, was to a man she needed desperately for everything but love. It was during this marriage that she began to walk on her knees, and it was this problem, half metaphor, half real that brought her to a mad healer, a magician who irrevocably changed her life. Fantastic, affecting and devastatingly funny, MAGIC MAN, MAGIC MAN is rare in its emotional intensity and its evocation of a woman coming to terms with her family, her husband and finally herself.
Peachy
Forty-five-year-old Peachy cavorts wildly through ... Discovery of sex and writing in her youth, expulsion from high school for plagiarizing a story she never stole, alienation from school and family as a result, and into a marriage that includes the loss of their child. Peachy delivers all this and much more as she wends her magic way to a hopefulness that many readers find exhilaratingly accessible.