Skirts

by Mimi Albert

Overview

Skirts is a novel about three highly intelligent young women in
New York City, coming of age in the early 1960s, when the drug culture
is just taking hold. Each has escaped the mores and habits of her parental
home, either by "running away" and setting up house in some arty tenement,
or just by participating in an alternative lifestyle while she lives with an
unaware parent in a palatial New York apartment. Each of the three
ultimately goes in a different direction: one discovers that what she
really wants is a fulfilling and prosperous marriage like her
mother's ought to have been -- but the other two find themselves
seeking fulfillment either through art or professional success,
swimming against the tide of the society in which they live.
In a way, Skirts is a kind of "Sex And the City" for the early 60s
-- the three young women haven't yet "found" themselves, but
through the action of the novel, it would seem as if they're
on their way.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940045053471
Publisher:	Mimi Albert
Publication date:	10/15/2012
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	714 KB

About the Author

Mimi Albert is the award winning author of two published novels. Her first , The Second Story Man, received reviews in The New York Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, Library Journal, The Village Voice, and many other venues. It was excerpted in the anthology, A Different Beat: Writing by Women of the Beat Generation. Her second novel, Skirts, published by Baskerville, won a Northern California Book Reviewers’ award as the best work of fiction. Albert has also won a PEN/NEA syndicated fiction award and a PEN Los Angeles award for her short story “Some Human Beings”.

Editorial Reviews

With biting humor and a firm sense of place, Albert ( The Second Story Man ) evokes a scene that was both exciting and dangerous: the New York bohemian subculture in the early 1960s. Archeology student Helene Elphrick desperately wants to shed both her controlling Jewish parents and her middle-class morality. Lonely and vulnerable, she is an easy mark for Zalman Finster, a Hasidic rabbi turned artist who introduces the giddy young woman to the avant-garde cultural scene and to a wide variety of mood-altering drugs. With sharply perceptive writing that catches the essence of provocative characters, the author takes Helene through the wildly energetic bohemian counterculture of the day. In her forays to the Cedar Tavern, former hangout for Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and Stanley's Bar, she is joined by her impressionable friends Victoria and Ruth, and the three easily succumb to posturing, fraud and much worse. Bolstered by a gritty and brutal city background and enriched by a colorful lot of scruffy intellectuals, Helene's adventures become a heady tale of loss of innocence. Author tour. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In Skirts , Albert returns to Manhattan in the Sixties, the territory of her acclaimed first novel, Second Story Man ( LJ 1/15/76). Her protagonists are cousins Ruth and Helene, both in flight from the stifling respectability of their lower-middle-class Bronx families. Along with their friend Victoria, the young women collect experiences, men, and ideas. Life is an adventure until both cousins are seduced by Zalman Finster, a Village character who dazzles the women with nihilism, jazz, sex, and, above all, drugs. Albert's narrative resembles a jazz concerto with Helene as the melody augmented by riffs from Ruth, Victoria, and Zalman and counterpoint provided by a disapproving chorus of family and friends. As Helene and Ruth are drawn into Zalman's vortex, the author brilliantly re-creates that moment when the sun had set on the Beats but not yet risen on the Sixties youth rebellion. With lucid prose and achingly real characterizations, Albert fulfills the promise of her early fiction. For most collections.-- Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.

Library Journal