Cleans Up Nicely: A Novel

(Paperback)

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When twenty-something artist Erica Mason moves from laid-back Mexico to Manhattan in the mid-1970s, she finds a hard-edged, decadent, and evolving art scene. Her life there leads her to a self-destructive string of affairs with men, alcohol, and drugs, but also, ultimately, to the self-respect that has long eluded her. ;

Reviews

Erica Masons rite of passage is not only a love affair with art, men, alcohol, drugs, and jazz in the swirl that was the downtown scene in a radically evolving era in New York, but also a resurrection from addiction and self-delusion. At once fast-moving, funny, and heartrending, this is a deftly handled study of one gifted young womans path from self-destruction to self-knowledge, self-respect, and well-being. Randolph Hogan, former New York Times Book Review editor

Cleans Up Nicely is a pitch-perfect, picaresque tale of love lost and found, talent squandered and reclaimed, and friendship forgotten and redeemed in gritty 1970s New York. It all spins around Erica, a burgeoning artist with a peripatetic past and a talent for courting trouble. In evocative prose, Dahl gives us an insiders look at New Yorks demimonde, a motley assortment of bartenders, bosses, art dealers, academics, musicians, radical feminists, writers, working girls, pimps, pushers, and hangers-on. Joan Duncan Oliver, Editor at Large, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and author of The Meaning of Nice

Author Bio

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with an honors degree in Latin American Studies, Linda Dahl worked as a freelance journalist in Mexico, Ecuador, and Brazil, with a particular interest in the arts. Based in New York since the mid 1970's, her books reflect her interests in the arts and love of research. Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (Pantheon, 1984) was called a brilliant work of oral history by Publishers Weekly. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (Pantheon, 2000), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Haunted Heart: A Biography of Susannah McCorkle (University of Michigan Press, 2006), wrote Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic is vivacious, tender, saturnine, industrious and deeply intelligent. Her novel, Gringa in a Strange Land (Robert D. Reed Publishers), won the Writers in the Sky Award for Best Creative Writing of 2010. ;
; ; ; ; Linda has just completed a new novel, Cleans Up Nicely, to be published in
2013 by She Writes Press.
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