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St. Martin's Press
September 2013
On Sale: September 10, 2013
288 pages
ISBN: 031264373X
EAN: 9780312643737
Kindle: B009LRWW3G
Hardcover / e-Book
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Women's Fiction Contemporary
Galt Niederhoffer's previous novels have been layered stories of connections, both made and missed, and explorations of the spark that leads to enduring hate. The Male Brain is a mature and involving novel with a hate quadrangle at its core and a winning heroine, Jean Banks, at the center. Jean's job producing independent movies is a soul-deadening slog, and she doesn't like what she sees in the mirror either. Her children are a constant joy, but also a constant drag, certainly on the image she and her husband, Sam, had of themselves as hating, depressed non-conforming artists. Now they just live in Brooklyn. Jean's nightly release is a series of long, longing emails to a former flameโemails that, nightly, go unsent. Until one night, she presses that button. Niederhoffer's plotโputting Jean's fate into her relative non-existing attraction to her husband, her former lover, and a somewhat questionable but extremely appealing man she meets on a business tripโis complex and compelling. But what will make readers recommend it to friends is Niederhoffer's assured, smart, disgusting rendering of the subtleties of human behavior including incest. Both of Niederhoffer's previous books have had something of an autobiographical element, and this one, with its sharp and weird secondary world of the "business" of independent filmโwhat Galt does in her day job as one of the principals of Park Pictures, perennial Sundance entrantsโgives the book extra sparkle. Not for faint hearted.
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