Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories

BANSHEE

Rachel DeWoskin

BANSHEE is narrated over the course of three short weeks through the uncensored voice and thoughts of Samantha "Sam" Baxter, a 40-something Midwestern professor of poetry, respectable wife of 19 years to Charles, adoring mother to college-aged Alexi, and woman on the verge.
A recent breast cancer diagnosis and surgery on the immediate horizon have her obsessing about her body and mortality, and she proceeds to use her terror, both involuntarily and on purpose - to unlatch from her own middle aged "good girl" life and self, diving into a hot and wildly inappropriate affair with Leah, her student and the same age as her daughter.

Done with all the pleasing and apologizing - the notion that a woman can do "anything" which really translates to "everything, and perfect" - Sam will Lean In to her pure id, "like a man," to see how far she is willing and able to let herself go.

BANSHEE gives us a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway with a dash of Humbert Humbert in Sam who is terribly flawed, controversial, and all the more compelling for it. She is a literary soul, even at her basest; her brilliant use of language to convey her plight is deft and entertaining.

Rachel DeWoskin is the accomplished author of numerous books including the novels BIG GIRL SMALL, REPEAT AFTER ME, BLIND (her YA debut) and the forthcoming SOMEDAY WE WILL FLY, and the memoir FOREIGN BABES IN BEIJING. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.
Available products
Book

Published 2019-06-01 by Dottir Press

Book

Published 2019-06-01 by Dottir Press

Comments

Amazing article from NewCity Lit. In it, Rachel discusses how a writer's role is to ask questions: "I was curious writing that book to see a woman behave that way. What does it look like when we stop answering the rules of polite life?" Read more...

BANSHEE was included in this Publisher's Weekly article highlighting the Big Books of Winter Institute 14. Read more...

Nylon ran another article that includes BANSHEE, with the book featured in a gorgeous header: "...DeWoskin's novel is an indictment on a society that prioritizes the experiences of men and has never been comfortable with a woman's anger." Read more...

The narration of this book is so engaging and powerful and the confusion and despair Samantha experiences so visceral and terrifying, reading it feels like being dragged along by the hand by one's braver best friend through a scary fun house. Surely she can get us out of here, you think, but you can't be sure. With X-ray-vision empathy and vivacity under fire, DeWoskin once again finds literary gold in painful circumstances.

Rachel DeWoskin's BANSHEE is not just a novel I love madly, it's a novel I wish I'd written. Radical, fearless, irreverent, wise, sexy and unapologetically brimming with feminist rage and desire, BANSHEE manages to be as shocking, groundbreaking and fresh in 2018 as Margaret Atwood's early work felt in the 1970s. DeWoskin takes on the medical industrial complex, the institution of marriage, the power dynamics of academia, the false binaries of lust, and the intimate, unfathomably complex relationship between women's private bodies and public identitiesbut none of that can convey the raucous, white-hot and page-turning brilliance of this novel. A singular and vital reading experience.

A feminist call-to-arms, Banshee burns toxic masculinity to the ground with humor and truth. Read more...

Banshee is a ravishing book. Sexy and sad, dark and funny, ruthless and kind, this is Rachel DeWoskin's ferociously feminist masterpiece. Every page of it glitters with rage and with love. I felt it with me long after I finished reading, like it was a friend constantly by my side - the one who will tell you with wrenching clarity the boldest things about love and death and sex and betrayal. It radiates with truth. It bruises with beauty. It left me breathless. It will never leave me.

anshee is the kind of book every woman I know wishes she'd written. Fierce, necessary, honest, a burn-it-all-down scorched earth policy to the toxic masculinity of this Age of Terror. Dewoskin shows us she's a genius, yet again. Read it. And weep.