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A thirty-year-old virgin embarks on a quest to find true love in this rediscovered post-modern tragicomedy.
“She was a virgin and her virginity had burrowed in. . . . the idea of sex had such a grip on her that she tried to avoid, totally, thinking about sex.”
Cynthia Buchanan’s Maiden was a sensation when it was published in 1972, earning comparisons to the generation-defining novels of Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. More than fifty years later, it remains a startlingly contemporary, highly stylish satire of heterosexual romance and the sex-and-drug-addled California of the 1960s.
Thirty-year-old Fortune Dundy is not ready to give up on finding her one true love. Unencumbered by experience or social grace, she pursues romance through endless date-matching questionnaires and personal ads, a virginal Don Quixote in rhinestones and sequins. Her only confidant is Bert, named for the real-life host of the televised Miss America pageant, who lives in her head and offers commentary on her every disastrous interaction with the opposite sex.
A flyer for a swinging singles apartment complex named Villa Dionysus beckons Fortune to Southern California, where she hopes to find love amid the sand and suntan oil. She meets a slew of desperate characters—including her roommate Biscuit, an embittered divorcee with a psychotic jealous streak; Milo, Biscuit’s boorish new boyfriend; and Skip, a handsome and elusive dentist—who become ensnared in her quest for the Right One.
A glitter-and-blood tragicomedy as audacious as Eve Babitz’s boozy stories of California malaise, written at a time when postmodern fiction was considered the province of male writers, Maiden is a true American literary original, and Fortune Dundy one of literature’s most lovable antiheroines: hopeful, delusional, and absolutely unforgettable.
PRAISE FOR MAIDEN:
"Cynthia Buchanan is a brilliant satirist. Maiden is The Day of the Locustif Nathanael West had his consciousness raised and a sense of humor." —Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
PREVIOUS PRAISE FOR MAIDEN:
“I love Maiden so much I can’t even do it justice! . . . All generations . . . will find Maiden more universal today than ever. An American classic, it’s wonderful.” —Lily Tomlin
"A delicious, painful book . . . Maiden compares with Play It As It Lays and The Bell Jar; these books form a natural trilogy. In some ways Maiden is the best of the three: less calculated, less mercilessly expert than Joan Didion's book, more sure of being a novel than Sylvia Plath's, more various than either—ranging surely through satire and the gentlest of romances to blood-sacrifice." —The New York Times Book Review
“Fortune Dundy . . . like many a heroine since Emma Bovary . . . [is] artist enough to have made herself, very deftly, out of available trash.” —Life Magazine
“A hilarious first novel.” —The New Yorker
“This fresh, efficient first novel speaks directly [to] the folly of women who define themselves only in terms of men and the tyranny of a culture that penalizes them unless they do so.” —TIME
“A brilliant, hysterically funny book.” —Library Journal
“Dazzling." —Newsweek