Mrs Bridge

Description

Evan S. Connell's "Mrs Bridge" is an extraordinary tragicomic portrayal of suburban life and one of the classic American novels of the twentieth century, influencing books such as Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections". This edition has an introduction by Joshua Ferris, author of "Then We Came to the End" and "The Unnamed". Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren't growing up into the people she expected, and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic, telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at the heart of a life of plenty. The companion novel, "Mr Bridge", telling the story from the other side of the marriage, is published in early 2013 in Penguin Modern Classics, with an introduction by Lionel Shriver, author of "We Need to Talk About Kevin". 'How it is done I only wish I knew' Dorothy Parker.

Reviews

How it is done I only wish I knew -- Dorothy Parker Esquire For all their satire and dark implications, the novels of the Bridge family remain in the memory as triumphs of faultless realism. Mr. Connell's art is one of restraint and perfect mimicry The New York Times It is very, very funny, often moving and sad, and written with an uncompromising realism that one rarely comes across. To me the Bridges were a revelation: I cannot recommend them too highly Daily Telegraph

Author description

Evan S. Connell was born in Kansas City in 1924. In 2009, he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Connell has written many novels over his lifetime, as well as poetry and short stories. He now lives in New Mexico. Joshua Ferris was born in Chicago in 1975. His first novel, Then We Came to the End (2007), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was a National Book Award Finalist and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel is The Unnamed (2010), and his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta and Tin House, among other publications. He lives in New York.