Squandering the Blue

In twelve dazzling stories, Kate Braverman immerses us in the hypnotic glow and encroaching darkness of 80s Los Angeles. A group of women - sober, drunk, loved, lonely, death-defying - go to AA meetings, wreck cars, agonize over Christmas shopping, write in the Hawaiian jungle, picket a nuclear installation in Nevada, tour Eastern Europe with an alienated daughter, and dread being exiled by divorce to live in some shabby apartment. Unflinching and tender, told in Braverman's luscious and incantatory prose, these haunting snapshots form an interconnected portrait of longing, despair and redemption.

'If, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it stands to reason that horror, too, lurks deep within the optic nerve. How else to explain the lushly menacing imagery in the poet and novelist Kate Braverman's latest book?' New York Times

'Braverman's Los Angeles is grittier than Eve Babitz's, lusher than Joan Didion's' LitHub