Simon’s dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen’s author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg’s. It’s 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island.īut Simon’s first assignment-editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the firm’s failing finances-makes him question the cost of admission. Join Francine Prose live on July 8 to celebrate the release of The Vixen: Prose’s Vixen is a triumph and a trip though the solid magic that books make real.” Samantha Hunt, author of Mr. It’s told with the heart, humor and daring of a true artist. Like Coney Island’s Cyclone, this story tumbles and tangles a reader’s grip of reality. The Vixen will fascinate and complicate the histories that haunt our present moments. “A rollicking trickster of a novel, wondrously funny and wickedly addictive.” Maria Semple, New York Times bestselling author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette “Prose is a powerhouse.

The vixen prose