makes you think-hard-about life's unavoidable travails, while making it impossible for you to suppress a smile.' -Lisa Shea, Elle ' tour de force of minimalist yet mind-expanding prose.

'Robison's incandescent soliloquy on the absurdity of existence hones fiction to a new and exhilarating measure of sharpness.' -Donna Seaman, Booklist Highly recommended for all public and academic fiction collections.' - Library Journal Her humorous presentation does not cheapen the tragic content of her novel but realistically portrays one method of survival. 'Robison's characters are vivid, colorful, and likable, and their story is absorbing. She is fatigued and full of a particular artistic contempt that no other part of the world could provide her.' - Publishers Weekly, 1 of 10 Essential Books of the American West The novel's narrator, Money Breton, is living a life that is symptomatic of Hollywood, of L.A., even if she doesn't live there. I will only say I would hand it to you, to keep, if I could. I will not attempt to summarize or articulate what is so brilliant and enlivening about this book. 'Among writers this is a well-known 'underappreciated' novel. A simple sentence fragment-'Canoe, moon, ukelele'-seems a close to perfect expression of lost beauty.' - The New Yorker 'The author, who is known as a minimalist, here creates a narrative out of fragmented paragraphs, and the book works best when she strips Money's most explicit fears away. 'I wish to hell I could write prose like this.The joy in this novel is for the reader, not the characters.

It's an amazing little book: all of Robison's minimalist genius is at work here.' -Cathleen Schine, New York Times Book Review 'An epic portrayed in miniature, a cry of cosmic pain in a voice of absurdist humor, an earnest insistence on maternal love in the language of skepticism and family dysfunction. dark jewel of a novel.' -Francine Prose, O: The Oprah Magazine. 'Mary Robison, almost as an afterthought, has created a novel that speaks volumes about life in Los Angeles: its stopping and starting, its rushing and emoting, its whimsy and its suspicious, subversive humor.' - Los Angeles Times Book Review Winner of the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction

Why did i ever by mary robison