Bøker av Maureen Mcneil

Tinker Street, the prequel to Anna Magdalena (2022), has arrived from Emperor Books!Struck by love for a boy as beautiful as a Michelangelo, fifteen year old Maggie digs her heels in. She's got what Willa Cather called "luck-making power of desire." She's a rebel in the best sense of the world.Growing up in Woodstock of the 1990s, the daring performance artist Anna Magdalena is called Maggie. Raised as a "love child" in a communal household in the magic of the Catskills, her mother refuses to reveal her father's name. Hoping to coax him into plain sight, she performs scenes from King Lear on the town green and exhibits her miniature portraits of townsfolk at the Woodstock library. Strangers approach with details of her birth, claiming her as their own but she's no fool. Artists she calls fairy godmothers rally around. On her way to New York City, Dylan's Man in the Long Black Coat appears and the whole wide adult world opens up.

Performance artist Anna Magdalena splays her audience open and leaves them begging for more. More life. More freedom. More imagination. By redefining family, history, myth, time and identity, she prompts readers to take action and forge a life of extraordinary beauty. Anna Magdalena is a contemporary novel about the power of art, love and imagination in its many forms. Reade Bordeaux, a forty-year-old Seattle plumber, married to Sgt. Becky Smith, is smitten with Anna Magdalena, a New York City performance artist retreated to Willapa, a forgotten Victorian town on the Washington coast. With a snap of her fingers, they land in the New York art world with her acquired family: Saxton, her ex-lover; Lulu, his mother; and Lulu's partner, Kermit Fleur, an old master dealer who takes Reade under his wing. Honey Dearborn and her son Frank, Reade's prickly neighbor in Willapa, drive the story with mischief, mystery and good fortune even after their death. But Sgt. Becky Smith has some tricks of her own. While Anna Magdalena provokes audiences with disappearing acts, vows, secrets, and outrageous art pieces that take place on NYC roof tops and beds, Becky pulls a fast one. The whole family rallies around Reade and he is awed as Anna Magdalena clicks her heels.