GHOSTS OF AMERICA

by Caroline Hagood

Overview

In GHOSTS OF AMERICA, on one unforgettable night, a sexist male novelist undergoes a peculiar transformation after being haunted by the ghosts of the women he has miswritten, Jackie Kennedy and Valerie Solanas.

Fiction. Women's Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934909713
Publisher:	Hanging Loose Press
Publication date:	10/15/2021
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Caroline Hagood is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. She has published two books of poetry, Lunatic Speaks , (FutureCycle Press, 2012) and MAKING MAXINE'S BABY, and one book-length essay, WAYS OF LOOKING AT A WOMAN. Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and the Economist. She blogs for The Kenyon Review.

Editorial Reviews

10/11/2021

Hagood debuts with an explosive if uneven riff on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (after the critical memoir Ways of Looking at a Woman), in which the ghosts of Jackie Kennedy and Valerie Solanas haunt a sexist novelist. Herzog, the author, spies on a female neighbor from his Brooklyn brownstone, consults fortune tellers, and laments the Trump administration, until the specter of Jackie Kennedy shows up while he’s watching documentary footage of JFK, whom he’s been struggling to write a novel about. After Jackie scolds him for his inaccuracies, she vanishes and is replaced with the ghost of Solanas, who dogs the author for his treatment of her in Shooting Andy, a novel inspired by the time she critically wounded Andy Warhol in 1968. Hagood aims for Herzog to realize his chauvinistic ways, and while the author clearly has fun with her characters, it’s difficult to believe Herzog’s eventual conversion, because while Valerie’s voice is sharply unique, Jackie sounds too similar to Herzog himself, which undermines the fantastical conceit. This fast and funny revisionist satire might lack a convincing payoff, but it throws off plenty of nitro along the way. Agent: Al Zuckerman, Writers House. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly