Bye-bye / Jane Ransom.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ransom, Jane Reavill, 1958-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Harry Mathews Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bisexuality--Fiction.

Bisexuality.

Genre:

Fiction.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Mathews, Harry, 1930- (former owner) (Mathews Collection copy)

Physical Description:

vii, 187 pages ; 19 cm

Other Title:

Bye bye

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [1997]

Summary:

Bye-Bye lures us into the mind of a sexually adventurous New Yorker in her mid-30s haunted by memories of her mother and of her own failed marriage. Her too-perfect husband threw her out three years before the novel opens, because of her infidelities. Partly in an effort to wrench herself out of depression, she "disappears" by changing her appearance and assuming a false identity as Rose Anne Waldin, or Rosie. Rosie boasts three lovers: two women - one an S&M pornographer, the other an aloof "Personal Ad" - and one man, whom she meets at a book-burning. The books being burned are by a celebrated Chicano poet who (an angry public has discovered) was apparently never Chicano at all. The scandal involves an elusive performance artist known only as the "Andorgenie", whose identity-bending perversities mirror Rosie's. We gradually learn about Rosie's not-at-all-rosy past, of her compulsive, often darkly comic behavior, and of her obsession with murder. Soon it grows apparent that Rosie is preparing to commit some dramatic, possibly violent, act. Poking fun at the Soho scene, Bye-Bye explores what makes art Art at the end of the millennium. And it implicitly asks, what kind of aesthetic gesture can still deliver a serious punch in a mass-media culture infatuated with sex crimes and notoriety, without degenerating into a knee-jerk defense? Bye-Bye is itself of course one answer.

Notes:

"New York University Press prize for fiction"--Jacket.

Back of dust jacket has a blurb from Harry Mathews.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0814774903

OCLC:

35990421