Loverboy

In Victoria Redel's mesmerizing first novel, the question of what happens when a mother loves her child too much is deeply and darkly explored. Left with a small fortune by her parents and the cryptic advice, "it would do to find a passion," Redel's narrator sets out to become a mother--a task she feels she can be adequately passionate about. She conceives her son Paul through a loveless one-night stand, surrounds him with a wonderful, magical world for two--a world filled with books, music, endless games, and bottomless devotion--and calls him pet names like Birdie, Cookie, Puppy, and Loverboy. She wonders, "Has ever a mother loved a child more?" But as life outside their lace curtains begins to beckon the school-age Paul, his mother's efforts to keep him content in their small world become increasingly frantic and ultimately extreme by all definitions. In this exquisite debut novel, Victoria Redel takes us deep into the mind of a very singular mother, exposing the dangerously whisper-thin line between selfless and selfish motivation that exists in all types of devotion.

Literature & Fiction

Redel, Victoria

United States

Harper-perennial

Swoon (Phoenix Poets)

What does it mean to be a woman—a lover, mother and artist? In Swoon, Redel tackles the question of Eros as it animates domestic life. These are poems unafraid to embrace the sweetness of difficulty and the difficult sweetness of intimacy. Using short and extended lyric, prose poem, circular narrative, Redel refuses formal categorization, demanding of poetry a complex and textured vision of the female experience. Swoon is a robustly sexy, intelligent, daring book of poems.

Poetry

University of Chicago Press

What does it mean to be a woman—a lover, mother and artist? In Swoon, Redel tackles the question of Eros as it animates domestic life. These are poems unafraid to embrace the sweetness of difficulty and the difficult sweetness of intimacy. Using short and extended lyric, prose poem, circular narrative, Redel refuses formal categorization, demanding of poetry a complex and textured vision of the female experience. Swoon is a robustly sexy, intelligent, daring book of poems.

Where the Road Bottoms Out delivers us to the scenes of a young woman's battles against the various forces that would rob her of her freedom -- the relations that define her apart from how she would define herself. These are stories of what it means to be embedded in the multiform drama of parent and child: here a mother buries her children; there daughters watch grieving fathers and fathers scamming. Punctuated by dislocation and loss, this drama often turns on the inevitable moment that intimacy and love overlap with something that feels like violence, or at the point when a new kind of awareness is achieved as the solitary voice of one daughter dissolves into a "we" of sisters. Redel's charged and lyrical fictions enact a movement both away from a life and toward taking possession of a life. Over mountains, from hotel to hotel, in cars, on foot, we follow her determined journey to record her adventures as a first-generation American and as a writer of English prose. Here is a striking debut. Sixteen stories that combine an uncompromising and definitive "No!" with an astonishing tenderness.

Where The Road Bottoms Out: Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

KNOPF

Before Everything

A group of lifetime friends gather together to confront life, love, and now mortality “Everything you want a novel about life, death, and friendship to be—smart, moving, sweeping, poetic, stinging, just beautiful. I loved these women (and their men) and this elegy to their long-reaching bonds.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage Before Everything is a celebration of friendship and love between a group of women who have known each another since they were girls. They’ve faced everything together, from youthful sprees and scrapes to mid-life turning points. Now, as Anna, the group’s trailblazer and brightest spark, enters hospice, they gather to do what they’ve always done—talk and laugh and help each other make choices and plans, this time in Anna’s rural Massachusetts home. Helen, Anna’s best friend and a celebrated painter, is about to remarry. The others face their own challenges—Caroline with her sister’s mental health crisis; Molly with a teenage daughter’s rebellion; Ming with her law practice—dilemmas with kids and work and love. Before Everything is as funny as it is bittersweet, as the friends revel in the hilarious mistakes they’ve seen one another through, the secrets kept, and adventures shared. But now all sense of time has shifted, and the pattern of their lives together takes on new meaning. The novel offers a brilliant, emotionally charged portrait, deftly conveying the sweep of time over everyday lives, and showing how even in difficult endings, gifts can unfold. Above all it is an ode to friendship, and to how one person shapes the journeys of those around her.

VIKING

Before Everything: A Novel

Penguin Publishing Group

“I like Victoria Redel’s poems because of their braveness and their lucidity….There is no flight here to incoherence; the poems speak plainly and, in some cases, beautifully. The music is lovely and the tone, distinctive….” ―Gerald Stern

Already the World (Wick Poetry First Book)

The Kent State University Press

A group of lifetime friends gather together to confront life, love, and now mortality "Everything you want a novel about life, death, and friendship to be--smart, moving, sweeping, poetic, stinging, just beautiful. I loved these women (and their men) and this elegy to their long-reaching bonds." --Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage Before Everything is a celebration of friendship and love between a group of women who have known each another since they were girls. They've faced everything together, from youthful sprees and scrapes to mid-life turning points. Now, as Anna, the group's trailblazer and brightest spark, enters hospice, they gather to do what they've always done--talk and laugh and help each other make choices and plans, this time in Anna's rural Massachusetts home. Helen, Anna's best friend and a celebrated painter, is about to remarry. The others face their own challenges--Caroline with her sister's mental health crisis; Molly with a teenage daughter's rebellion; Ming with her law practice--dilemmas with kids and work and love. Before Everything is as funny as it is bittersweet, as the friends revel in the hilarious mistakes they've seen each another through, the secrets kept, and adventures shared. But now all sense of time has shifted, and the pattern of their lives together takes on new meaning. The novel offers a brilliant, emotionally charged portrait, deftly conveying the sweep of time over everyday lives, and showing how even in difficult endings, gifts can unfold. Above all it is an ode to friendship, and to how one person shapes the journeys of those around her.

Before Everything (Thorndike Press Large Print Core)

Thorndike Press Large Print

What happens if a mother loves her child too much?
Sybil and Marty, indifferent to their daughter in life, left her a small fortune and the cryptic advice, "It would do well to find a passion." In Victoria Redel's utterly mesmerizing new novel, we listen to the voice of this daughter as she willfully sets out to become a mother-- who is nothing if not passionate.
She has named her son Paul, but calls him "Birdie," "Cookie," "Puppy," "Loverboy," as she creates a wonderful, magical world for two, a world filled with books, music, endless games, and bottomless devotion. "Has ever a mother loved a child more?" she wonders as they play spy on the strangers from behind their heavy, lace curtains. But as life outside begins to beckon to the boy, the mother's efforts to keep their small world confined become increasingly frantic and ultimately tragic.
In this exquisite debut novel, Victoria Redel takes us deep into the mind of a very singular mother, and yet through her we see the dangerously whisper-thin line between selfless and selfish motivation that exists in all devotion. After all, "Who has ever wanted to share a love?"

Romance

Graywolf Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Redel, Victoria. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Redel, Victoria

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Redel, Victoria. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Loverboy

Swoon (Phoenix Poets)

Swoon (Phoenix Poets)

Where The Road Bottoms Out: Stories

Before Everything

Before Everything: A Novel

Already the World (Wick Poetry First Book)

Already the World (Wick Poetry First Book)

Before Everything (Thorndike Press Large Print Core)

Loverboy