CABS: Anna Solomon “The Book of V”

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The sto­ry of Esther is often told as the tri­umph of a Jew­ish minor­i­ty over one man’s blind­ing hatred, through the courage and self­less­ness of one woman. Anna Solomon’s The Book of V. chal­lenges this sim­ple nar­ra­tive — ask­ing, what is Vashti’s sto­ry? And how do we choose to rep­re­sent women’s lives, both in the past and today? The nar­ra­tive alter­nates between the his­tor­i­cal Esther’s per­spec­tive, Vivian, known as Vee, a 1970s wife of a sen­a­tor, and Lily, a mod­ern-day Brook­lynite, sec­ond wife, and moth­er of two. Each of these women’s lives is con­strained by the expec­ta­tions of a patri­ar­chal soci­ety. Vee enjoys her socialite life but is plagued by her husband’s past and her own inse­cu­ri­ties when she com­pares her­self to her peers; Lily is haunt­ed by the mem­o­ry of her husband’s first wife, and can­not relin­quish feel­ings of inep­ti­tude towards her domes­tic duties and her marriage.  

No charge

You can purchase The Book of V through online retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Audible Audio Book) and in person at Barnes and Noble on 725, across from the Dayton Mall.

Anna Solomon is the author of three novels—The Book of V., Leaving Lucy Pear, and The Little Bride—and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, One Story, The Boston Globe, Tablet, and elsewhere. Anna is the recipient of awards from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, and The Missouri Review, among others, and her short story “The Lobster Mafia Story” was chosen as Boston’s One City One Story read. Anna is co-editor with Eleanor Henderson of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers. Previously, she worked as an award-winning journalist for National Public Radio’s Living on Earth. Anna is a graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches writing at Barnard College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center. Anna was born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

Partnering with:  Hadassah, Dayton Chapter