Short Takes

by Nina Shengold, July 28, 2008

Little Stalker
Jennifer Belle
Riverhead Books, 2008, $14
None dare call it chick lit. Bestselling Stone Ridge author Belle’s black-comic universe shares more DNA with Nick Hornby than anyone wearing Manolos. Blocked novelist Rebekah Kettle is wildly obsessed with a Woody Allenesque filmmaker. When a fortuitously placed window gives her an eyeful of his scandalous liaisons, she has some decisions to make. Manhattan served very dry, with a definite twist.

The Mountain
Raymond J. Steiner
CSS Publications, 2008, $18
It doesn’t get more local than this loving, intricately detailed saga of an Overlook-obsessed painter whose career spans six decades of Woodstock history, from the rival Byrdcliffe and Maverick colonies to that concert in Bethel. Painter and Art Times editor Steiner surrounds his fictional hero with so many real locations, you’ll swear you’ve seen his work. Reading at the Woodstock Artists Association Museum August 2 at 4pm.

The Painter From Shanghai
Jennifer Cody Epstein
Norton, 2008, $24.95
Pan Yuliang created a sensation in the artistic demimonde of 1920s Paris with her startling nude self-portraits. This striking debut novel boldly reimagines the life of a Chinese teenager, who was sold to a brothel by her opium-addicted uncle and would later transform herself into an internationally notorious artist. Journalist and Glimmer Train finalist Epstein just read at Oblong Books.