Bigfoot Dreams: A Novel

by Francine Prose

Overview

Vera Perl, the bright, edgy heroine of Bigfoot Dreams, is the star reporter of a sleazy supermarket tabloid. At work, she conjures up stories about UFO sightings, miracle cures in garden vegetables, evidence of life after death, and the ever-popular Bigfoot. At home, she contends with a precocious daughter, and errant husband, and her own fantasies. It all works well enough it she doesn't think too deeply. But then one day Vera discovers that one of the stories she's invented has turned out to be true in ways she never could have dreamed...

Sharp, funny, moving, and profound, Bigfoot Dreams is vintage Francine Prose. She get to the heart of a world where tabloid headlines - ELVIS ALIVE AND WELL ON MARS - are the closest we come to the marvelous, and where the irrepressible human longing for the astonishing and the unexpected can be fulfilled.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781480445086
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	09/24/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	524,469
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen novels, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prose is a highly regarded critic and essayist, and has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, and she lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

April 1, 1947

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, New York

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe College, 1968

What People are Saying About This

Larry McMurtry

One of our finest writers...she's deft and deep, and the fun she has here with popular culture is wonderful.

Editorial Reviews

You can walk into Vera Perl's Brooklyn apartment house and pick her out of a clutch of tenants: you will recognize her charged, speculative voice. She writes for a yellow rag called This Week, thinks in absurd, alliterative headlines and tailors her made-up stories to photographs taken as if by chance by her colleague Solomon. The fun begins when Solomon snaps two kids selling lemonade on a lawn in Flatbush, and Vera endows them with names and a psychiatrist father, and the water used in the lemonade with astonishing curative qualitiesall of which, except possibly the last, turns out to be true. The paper is slapped with a lawsuit, Vera is fired, her estranged husband Lowell flies in from Los Angeles for a night of love and leaves several days later with their daughter Rosalie. This gives Vera the chance, via a Cryptobiological Society meeting at the Grand Canyon, to pursue her dreams of the eponymous Bigfoot, a monster whose footprints are the size of bathtubs and whose arms shatter buildings with a single swipe. Prose's (Hungry Hearts account of these high jinks conveys every scene with psychedelic gusto, an authenticity of language and setting, and an acute sense of character. This is a lollapalooza of a novel, which keeps the reader hanging on every word and conjures believing out of make-believe. (April 23)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This "lively and upbeat" story follows the life of a tabloid journalist whose professional and family life has gotten so screwy that she dreams the "legendary creature will rescue her" (LJ 4/1/86). She is redeemed somewhat when one of her goofy stories turns out to be true.

Library Journal

"[Prose] conveys every scene with psychedelic gusto. . . . This is a lollapalooza of a novel.” —Publishers Weekly

“Lively and upbeat.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher