Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Elaine

Elaine

Self, Will

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 0802165435
ISBN13: 9780802165435
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: Sep 16 2025
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.87 Width: 5.43 Depth: 8.11
Language: English

The Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella writes his most American novel yet--a brilliant portrait of a 1950s housewife, based on the life of the author's mother, and an exploration of sexual freedom and sublimated desire

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation by The Guardian. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril. Based on the intimate diaries Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm: a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, employing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

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