After Claude
By (Author) Iris Owen
New York Review Books
NYRB Classics
15th February 2011
30th November 2010
Main
United States
General
Fiction
813.54
Paperback
232
Width 127mm, Height 203mm, Spine 12mm
240g
Harriet has left her boyfriend Claude, "the French rat." At least that is how she prefers to frame the matter. In fact, after yet one more argument, Claude has just instructed Harriet to move out of his Greenwich Village apartment-not that she has any intention of doing so. To the contrary, she will stay and exact her vengeance-or such was her intention until Claude has her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to give advice, but Harriet only takes offense, and you can see why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women's lives and hearts-until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.
Some of the withering put-downs, observations and asides are as beautiful as they are brutal. Best of all, it's very funny; as long as your taste in humour is on the savage side. Tribune
Iris Owens moved from Greenwich Village to Paris at the age of twenty after her first marriage failed. She wrote numerous wildly popular and regularly banned erotic novels for the Traveller's Companion series of Olympia Press under the pseudonym Harriet Daimler. Under her own name, she published After Claude and Hope Diamond Refuses. She died in 2008. Emily Prager is the author of three novels, Clea & Zeus Divorce, Eve's Tattoo, and Roger Fishbite, as well as the acclaimed book of short stories A Visit from the Footbinder, and a compendium of her humorous writings, In the Missionary Positions. She has been a satirical columnist for The Village Voice, The New York Observer, and The New York Times, as well as London's Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. She teaches humor writing at New York University, and lives in Greenwich Village