Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies
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https://www.simonandschuster.com …

PARIS, 7 A.M.

Liza Wieland

A literary reimagination of the life of America's greatest poet, Elizabeth Bishop, centering on the time she spent in Paris in 1937, early in her career when the axis of Hitler and Mussolini began to loom in Europe.

June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop, still only a young woman and not yet one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, arrives in France with her college roommates. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they were expected to find an impressive husband, a quiet life, and act accordingly. But the world is changing, and as they explore the City of Light, the larger threats of fascism and occupation are looming. There, they meet a community of upper-crust expatriates who not only bring them along on a life-changing adventure, but also into an underground world of rebellion that will quietly alter the course of Elizabeth's life forever.

Paris, 7 A.M. imagines 1937 the only year Elizabeth, a meticulous keeper of journals, didn't fully chronicle in vivid detail and brings us from Paris to Normandy where Elizabeth becomes involved with a group rescuing Jewish "orphans" and delivering them to convents where they will be baptized as Catholics and saved from the impending horror their parents will face.

Poignant and captivating, Liza Wieland's Paris, 7 A.M. is a beautifully rendered take on the formative years of one of America's most celebratedand and mythologized female poets.

Liza Wieland is the 2017 winner of the Robert Penn Warren Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, previously awarded to Cormac McCarthy, Madison Smartt Bell, and Dorothy Allen, among others. She is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her other work has won two Pushcart Prizes, the Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her novel-in-stories, Land of Enchantment, was a longlist finalist for the 2016 Chautauqua Prize.

Available products
Book Published 2019-06-04 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published 2019-06-04 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Wieland's prose is simultaneously poetic and sparse, much like Bishop's poems... In college, Bishop contemplated what it meant to keep her "eyes open" and attain a deeper vision that could reorder pieces of the past and present into coherence, like a cubist painting or modernist collage, a feat she achieved in writing. Wieland's rendition of Bishop's life aptly and beautifully mirrors that process.

The life of extraordinary poet Elizabeth Bishop is a more than challenging subject for fiction, but Liza Wieland, in this rendering, captures a sensibility that is believable as Bishop's, complete with its sometimes acerbic lucidity, its wit, and crystalline precision of mind. Paris, 7 A.M. stands with works like Colm Toibin's The Master in its startlingly credible rendition of the inner life of a great artist of our time.

Paris, 7 A.M weaves historical facts, biographical speculation, and the plaintive, teasingly playful elements of poems written by one of America's most beloved 20th-century poets, Elizabeth Bishop - and it is nothing short of wizardry. I am romanced by this story, half true, half re-imagined, about the queer women bohemians of pre-World War II, who dared to resist, create and salvage in the midst of virulent fascism. I love these heroes, as much as I love the true poetry of this daring novel.

Meticulously researched and crisply imagined, biography, history, and poetry come together in this elegant, literary-but-not-too-literary spellbinder. Nothing is left out - Bishop's love life, her alcoholism, her extraordinarily intense flashbacks from childhood, even her asthma - all are brought to life as Europe descends into war. A masterwork.

Inspired by a missing period in poet Elizabeth Bishop's journals, Wieland imagines her adventures in France on the brink of World War II... Finely written... Wieland creates an unsettled, dread-soaked atmosphere appropriate to the period.

Striking imagery and sharp, distinctive language shimmer in Wieland's haunting fifth novel, which imagines American poet Elizabeth Bishop as a young woman... [Wieland's] her dreamlike juxtapositions of the searing and the sensual probe the artistic process, the power of the mother-daughter bond, and the creative coming-of-age of one of America's greatest poets.