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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 flame—emails that, nightly,
go unsent. Until one night, she
presses that button. Niederhoffer's plot—putting 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 trip—is 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 film—what
Galt does in her day
job as one of the principals of Park Pictures, perennial
Sundance entrants—gives
the book extra sparkle. Not for faint hearted.
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