Cassandra At The Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra At The Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.
 
Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken--at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. As she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has, Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother.
 
First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.

Dorothy Baker (1907-1968) was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1907 and raised in California. After graduating from UCLA, she traveled in France, where she began a novel and, in 1930, married the poet Howard Baker. The couple moved back to California, and Baker completed an MA in French, later teaching at a private school. After having a few short stories published, she turned to writing full time, despite, she would later claim, being seriously hampered by an abject admiration for Ernest Hemingway. In 1938, she published Young Man with a Horn, which was awarded the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1942 and, the next year, published Trio, a novel whose frank portrayal of a lesbian relationship proved too scandalous for the times; Baker and her husband adapted the novel as a play in 1944, but it was quickly shut down because of protests. Her final novel, Cassandra at the Wedding (also published as an NYRB Classic), examined the relationship between two exceptionally close sisters, whom Howard Baker asserted were based on both Baker herself and the couple's two daughters. Baker died in 1968 of cancer.

Gary Giddins was the jazz critic for The Village Voice, where his column Weather Bird ran for thirty years, and is presently director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has contributed articles about music and movies to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Esquire, The New York Sun, and Vanity Fair, among others. He has written twelve books, including Visions of Jazz, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998, and Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams. His most recent book is Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781590176016
ISBN 10	1590176014
Title	Cassandra At The Wedding
Author	Dorothy Baker
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2012-08-21
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.