Nymph: A Novel

(, Paperback original)

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Description

Not yet thirty, Bathory, or 'Bat' to those near to her, has assembled a peculiar CV: Model, sex worker, linguist and scholar of Latin. But nothing in her lively job history employs the singular traits she inherited from her strange family., chief among them an uncanny ability to sidestep seemingly certain death(s). An appropriate atavistic instinct, for someone from a long line of assassins and spies. Her clan are assassins of a romantic bent, her parents issuing theories on love galore. However Bat is set on swerving any enduring romantic loves, and she's set on dying young. Now, if she could only avoid that one alluring figure from her father's past.

A thriller, a love story, and a dynamic examination of class, violence and connection. The images we make to share and those we strive to conceal, alienation and salvation, magic and technology, LacCava' s bold new novel is propelled by the compelling violence one can seed in contradiction.

Reviews

A visceral, exorcism-like exploration of a body blunted to pain and a mind moulded by generational trauma, lust, and dysfunction ... sensual, slippery and stylish. -- Ana Cafolla * The Face *
A sharp critical vision lurches into focus: of culture as commodity, of suffering as currency, and of the female body as this agon's generalized battleground. -- Tom McCarthy
I haven't read a book in a while that just pulled me in, and you're so immersed in the characters and in the world. It's quite a slice of life -- Kaia Gerber * Vanity Fair *
La Femme Nikita meets Bridges of Madison County -- Marlowe Granados
Reading her, I never know what to expect. She investigates unique undergrounds, interested in what is never obvious. She takes chances, risks, and never chooses the safe way. -- Lynne Tillman, author of Thrilled to Death
Reading Nymph feels like being gifted with an elegant, hypnotic glimpse into a disorienting mirror world where all is possible and all is connected. A taut exploration of fate, inevitability, violence, and the beautiful impossibility of extricating ourselves from those intimacies, and those darknesses, which can seem ordained -- Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
Here is a novel that seems to shrug off the pain of being young and adrift in the world, while secretly, it draws you into the dark recesses of loneliness and disillusionment. I fear her book will destroy you. -- Merve Emre, author of Paraliterary
Understated and elegant, LaCava's writing inspires both dread and longing; her characters, nearly all of them direct to the point of cruelty -- Corinne Segal, Lit Hub

Author Bio

Stephanie LaCava is a writer based in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Harpers,
Artforum, Vogue, New York Times, New York Review of Books and Interview.