On Fire Island (The Fire Island Trilogy) - Softcover

Rosen, Jane L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593546105 ISBN 13: 9780593546109

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

"Dazzling...as funny as it is poignant, nostalgic as it is sharp." —Carley Fortune, New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After

A book editor spends one last summer on Fire Island in this sparkling and surprising new novel from the author of A Shoe Story.

As a book editor, Julia Morse lived and breathed stories. Whether with her pen to a manuscript or curled up with a book while at her beloved Fire Island cottage, her imagination alight with a good tale, she could anticipate practically any ending. The ending she’d never imagined was her own.

To be fair, no one expects to die at thirty-seven. So when the unthinkable happens to Julia, rather than following the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, she chooses to spend one last summer near those she loves most.  

As she follows her adoring, novelist husband Ben to their—unexpectedly full—home on Fire Island, she discovers the ripple affect her life has had on the trajectory of so many: her baseball loving, young-at-heart neighbor who believes it’s best not to go it alone, two bright-eyed teenagers eager to become adults, and her best friend who must shake off heartbreak for a new chance at love.

With poignant comedy and insight, On Fire Island is an ode to the stories all around us and to the brightest types of loves…for the people closest to you and the places that shape you.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane L. Rosen is an author and screenwriter whose critically acclaimed first novel, Nine Women, One Dress, has been translated into ten languages. She lives in New York City and on Fire Island with her husband and three daughters.
 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

one

Fire Island

No one is quite sure why the narrow, thirty-two-mile barrier beach off the coast of Long Island is called Fire Island, but there is much conjecture on the topic. Many believe the name is tied to its origins-a violent winter storm in 1690 that broke through the mainland of Long Island, creating four separate inlets. The Dutch word for four (vier) is pronounced somewhat like fire, so that mispronunciation may be responsible. I tend to prefer the version that states the name is derived from the fires that pirates set on its shores to lure unsuspecting ships onto the great sandbar before looting and pillaging everyone and everything on board. Although I am a pacifist, that version is considerably more interesting to me than a Dutch typo.

The backstory of the island's name, as intriguing as it is, is eclipsed by the astonishing history of its many waves of inhabitants. What began with Native Americans, pirates, and moonshiners eventually gave way to a rapid succession of authors, actors, communists, artists, and an entire enclave of LGBTQ+ vacationers.

As a lover of the written word, I am most taken with the list of authors who've roamed its shores. Legendary scribes, from Truman Capote to Tennessee Williams, spent time on Fire Island, if not writing, I would imagine, at least thinking-which, as an editor, I know is half the battle. The poet Frank O'Hara was struck and killed by a dune buggy on its beaches in 1966, a notable distinction on a virtually car-free island. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner are said to have drummed up the premise for their infamous comedy sketch, "The 2000 Year Old Man," as teenagers there in the 1940s. And a decade later, Arthur Miller played softball on the field right across from my house, while his wife, Marilyn Monroe, sat in the stands.

It was in that house across from the ball field, ten wonderful years ago, that the love of my life, author and sportswriter, Benjamin Morse, got down on one knee and presented me with an advance copy of his second novel, opened to the dedication. It read:

I love you, Julia. Marry me?

I said yes.

Ben and I had our first kiss on Fire Island the summer before he proposed, and we knew instantly that it was "our" place. It's a common phenomenon. People need to be romantics to fall in love with a narrow strip of land that could be washed away by one big wave, and where their only mode of transportation is a bicycle or their own two feet.

At first glance, Ben and I make an odd couple. We undeniably call to mind Beauty and the Beast: me, petite, with dark shiny hair and my button nose perpetually buried in a book, and him, with his clunky towering frame, unruly locks and moody, brooding demeanor. Though I always found him to be sexy-sexy like an unmade bed. Intellectually, on the other hand, we are completely in tune and have an uncanny ability to finish each other's sentences-not surprising since for most of our marriage I was also his editor.

The decision for us to collaborate wasn't so much a choice on either of our parts as a natural progression. It began with an author passing pages to their spouse-a common occurrence even when publishing is not the family business-and grew from there. A year into our marriage, when Ben's editor hinted at retirement, the writing was quite literally on the page. His publisher agreed to assign someone else to deal with the financial components of the job and I came on board to fill the rest of the role. I had been looking to make a move for a while, and it was very exciting for both of us. Plus, as far as my career went, Ben had always felt like the one who got away. Even with two of my authors on the bestseller list at the time and one a Booker Prize winner, adding Ben to my list felt like a crowning achievement.

When I first heard the name Ben Morse, I was technically a newbie. I say technically because while I had only been in publishing for a year and a half at the time, I had considered myself an editor of sorts since the ninth grade when Ellen Crown's mother (an editor at Alfred Knopf) spoke on career day. By the time she was halfway through with her presentation, I was all in, and my intention never swayed.

I immersed myself in the classics, writing tiny notes in the page margins and highlighting character traits, conflicts, and points-of-view. While the other girls were obsessing over Titanic's Jack and Rose, I went to sleep dreaming of Cathy and Heathcliff or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. I got a greater high poring over my friends' English assignments than smoking a blunt with them in Sheep Meadow. And nothing thrilled me more than a prompt with a small word count. To me, editing felt like the best kind of puzzle.

My first real job, after graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English from Sarah Lawrence College, was at Sopher-Grace, a midsize publishing house run by a sexist tyrant. The narrow-minded managing editor, who inserted the fact that he was a Yale man into nearly every conversation, had a huge ego with little taste or talent to back it up. While others found him a charming throwback to a Mad Men-like, three-martini-lunch era of publishing, I found him pompous, misogynistic, and, in fact, not a very good editor-and he knew it. He also knew that firing me without cause would land him in hot water with HR, so he tried other tactics, like tasking me with reading a 120,000-word dramatic tome written by a sportswriter from the Daily News, which no one else wanted to tackle.

"Any plans this weekend?" he had asked on a Friday afternoon, as I failed to slip by his open office door unnoticed.

"Nothing much," I lied, not wanting to get personal and admit that I had a blind date courtesy of my nana Hannah, who had been pushing me to go out with her neighbor's grandson, the Doctor, for months.

"Now you do," he said, handing me a cumbersome box containing a double-sided copy of the aforementioned five-hundred-page sweeping saga spanning three generations of a poor Irish family.

I canceled my plans, dealt with Nana, who I was apparently "pushing to an early grave with my lack of interest in settling down," and barely slept the entire weekend, and not because I wanted to impress my jerk of a boss-I couldn't put the book down. I immediately fell in love with its protagonist and developed an instant fascination with its author.

My nana was incorrect in her analysis; I had an interest in settling down. It was just that all my crushes of late had been on fictional characters who instilled unrealistic expectations when it came to my real love life. I went to sleep that weekend dreaming of my nineteenth-century Irish lover and woke itching with an unyielding curiosity about the man who had created him.

I excitedly pitched A Long Way to Tipperary at the office that Monday, thrilled by both the prospect of editing it and that my boss's plan to discourage me had backfired. I detailed my vision and explained how perfectly I felt it fit on our list. I comped it to epic bestsellers like Ken Follett and Pat Conroy and came just short of promising him the next Hemingway. My boss agreed to get to it tout de suite (his words, not mine) and then strung me along, as if he were in the process of reading, for weeks. Until one day, when I learned from Publishers Weekly that Random House had acquired it in a preempt. Telling my boss, who still hadn't read it, "I told you so," was of no consolation. I was frustrated and heartbroken.

The book landed on the New York Times Best Sellers list within weeks of publication and I witnessed one person after another lugging around the hefty page-turner everywhere I went. The New Yorker did a piece on Benjamin Morse, dubbing him the city's new Renaissance man on account of his ability to craft both epic love stories and gripping sports pieces with equal pizzazz....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593546105
• ISBN 13: 9780593546109
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland