Publishers Weekly
03/25/2024
Zyzak (The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel) returns with a rollicking tale of sex, money, and art theft. One afternoon in Los Angeles, Polish immigrant Wioletta picks up a glamorous hitchhiker, a woman named Bobby Sleeper. Wioletta introduces herself as Viva, and Bobby offers her a job as her live-in assistant. Bobby; her retired filmmaker husband, Sebastian; and their flamboyant houseguest, a playwright named Lance, introduce Viva to sprezzatura (“the art of studied nonchalance,” Lance explains). She quickly takes to their glitzy lifestyle, striking up sexual relationships with both Sebastian and Bobby, the latter of whom uses Viva as an accomplice to “fake-steal” a valuable Vermeer from her ex-husband, a Russian oligarch. The painting itself is missing from a German museum, and Bobby and the oligarch have a scheme going to split the multimillion-dollar reward for its safe return. Things take a turn, however, when one of Bobby’s other ex-husbands, Łyski, sneaks into her home, steals the painting from her closet, and absconds with it to Italy. Zyzak constructs a playful narrative, shuttling characters across the globe and into each other’s beds, and she takes advantage of Bobby’s loose-cannon nature to raise the stakes again and again. This is great fun. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts. (May)
From the Publisher
Advance praise for The Lady Waiting:
“A breakneck romp of a novel with a stolen Vermeer, a tangled love triangle, a half-baked heist and enough depraved opulence to make Gatsby gasp.” —People
“A very entertaining novel. . . . Zyzak constructs a nicely entangled web of secrets and undeclared loyalties.” —Wall Street Journal
“We're suckers for stories about grifters. . . and this novel from Magdalena Zyzak doesn't disappoint.” —Town & Country
“A riotous, thoroughly entertaining novel. . . . [and] lively picaresque.” —Center for Fiction
“With its madcap plot, fantastic central characters, and White Lotus–style wealth porn. . . Zyzak’s second novel seems like catnip for Hollywood. Funny, original, worldly, and very cool. A standout.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A rollicking tale of sex, money, and art theft. . . . Zyzak constructs a playful narrative. . . [raising] the stakes again and again. This is great fun.” —Publishers Weekly
“Electric with clever plays on language and accents, identities and desires, crimes petty and hellish, Zyzak’s geopolitical romp is canny, sexy, and mordant.” —Booklist
"A nail-biting delight.” —The Millions
“This novel pops. Magdalena Zyzak is in complete control and her world comes through with the clarity of the Vermeer at the center of it all. A cosmopolitan, sexy and funny novel.” —Percival Everett, New York Times-bestselling author of James
“A juicy and insanely original novel overflowing with effervescent prose and captivating characters. Audacious, entertaining, and over-the-top, this is the literary equivalent of your most bingeable show.” —Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
“A novel rich with charm and wisdom, crackling with wit and such a playful, subversive tone you might not catch the deeper isolation it examines so well. A superb accomplishment.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling
“A deliciously madcap, wholly original tale of friendship, lust, and ambition. Zyzak ably explores what it takes to survive in a world turned upside down—and what is lost when one succeeds. I savored every word.” –Kirstin Chen, New York Times-Bestselling author of Counterfeit
“With insights and characters so fresh they made me giddy, The Lady Waiting is raucous, sexy, and deeply hilarious.” –Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir
“A wildly crazy and funny novel, full of exotic characters and executed to technical perfection by Magdalena Zyzak. It made my brain more glamorous.” –Cat Marnell, author of How to Murder Your Life
Praise for The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel:
“Inventive and funny. . . unexpectedly moving.” ―The New York Times
“A wickedly good debut [with] a fleet-footed, darkly comic spirit . . . Zyzak's wicked wit expresses a matter-of-fact acceptance of the world as it is, rife with cruelty and suffering, but also with kindness, love and a lot of laughs…Mark Twain, for one, would have thoroughly enjoyed the all-too-human misadventures she describes.” ―Los Angeles Times
“Make way for Magdalena Zyzak! She writes in a way uniquely her own and approaches the English language with the joy and reverence of her countryman Joseph Conrad. The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel is a heady drink.” ―Gary Shteyngart
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-02-17
A 21-year-old Polish woman wins the immigration lottery, then keeps getting lucky.
As this unusual caper novel opens, our narrator, Viva—new to Los Angeles after a failed attempt to start her American life in Chicago—picks up a woman hitchhiking in a green cocktail dress on the 101. Bobby Sleeper turns out to be from Poland, too, though from a much wealthier and more cosmopolitan background. “At any given moment, half the population of LA is giving therapy to the other half,” Bobby informs Viva when she takes her out to lunch in gratitude for the ride. “Fifty percent of LA is depressed. Only five percent of Bhutan is. You ever been here?…The hamachi salad’s yummy.” Later that day, Viva takes a position as live-in personal assistant to Bobby and her rich, hot husband, Sebastian Sleeper, a retired film director. Along with the couple’s acerbic gay housemate, Lance, the group will engage in the daily custom of “spritzatura”—a Spritz Veneziano in the hot tub at dusk. One of many amusing aspects of Zyzak’s tale is its perspective; though the action occurs in 2018, it’s narrated from 2079, when Viva is 84, allowing for clever asides about how things “used to be” in our current time. Zyzak does an amazing job with Viva’s narration—because her English is not perfect, her understanding of the hyperarticulate Bobby runs a little behind the reader’s, though Viva has some insights she withholds until the very end (and a fine ending it is). The caper that sends the plot into overdrive involves The Lady Waiting, a (fictional) Vermeer painting stolen in a 2009 Berlin museum heist. Two of Bobby’s ex-husbands and Bobby herself have become involved in a scheme to return it for the huge reward, $50,000 of which can be Viva’s if she helps out. With its madcap plot, fantastic central characters, and White Lotus–style wealth porn (the kind where a character eats caviar off the kitchen floor after the jar falls out of the fridge), screenwriter Zyzak’s second novel seems like catnip for Hollywood.
Funny, original, worldly, and very cool. A standout.
