During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (New York Review Books (Paperback)) - Softcover

Chase, Joan

3.74

678 ratings by Goodreads

9781590177150: During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (New York Review Books (Paperback))

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590177150 ISBN 13: 9781590177150

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2014

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A multigenerational family drama about grief, motherhood, and coming of age, all taking place on an Ohio farm.

Joan Chase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The novel tells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of the family, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both a life-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonder what kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’s great trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’s daughter Grace.

A powerful story about family ties and tensions, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a book about place, charting the transformation of the old hardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America.

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From the Inside Flap:

life exhilarated with the richness and evocativeness of poetry."

WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

The novel that is sweeping the country. A beautiful story of 20th-century womanhood, of Gram, the Queen of Persia herself, who rules a house where five daughters and four granddaughters spin out the tragedies and triumphs of rural life in the 1950's.
From the Paperback edition.

About the Author:

Joan Chase (1936–2018) was born and raised in Ohio. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in philosophy and history and later enrolled in the Writing Workshop of the University of Vermont. After being turned down by several publishers, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia was released by Harper & Row in 1983 and went on to win numerous prizes, including the PEN / Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction by an American writer. Chase was also the author of the novel The Evening Wolves (1990) and the story collection Bonneville Blue (1991).

Meghan O’Rourke is the editor of The Yale Review and the author of three poetry collections (Once, Halflife, and Sun In Days) and a memoir, The Long Goodbye. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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PublisherNYRB Classics
Publication date2014
ISBN 10 1590177150
ISBN 13 9781590177150
BindingPaperback
Number of pages240
Rating
- 3.74
  
  678 ratings by Goodreads

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