UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION
Victoria Redel
Most acclaimed
Where the road bottoms out
1995
Where the Road Bottoms Out delivers us to the scenes of a young woman's battles against the various forces that would rob her of her freedom - the relations that define her apart from how she would define herself. These are stories of what it means to be embedded in the multiform drama of parent and child: here a mother buries her children; there daughters watch grieving fathers and fathers scamming. Punctuated by dislocation and loss, this drama often turns on the inevitable moment that intimacy and love overlap with something that feels like violence, or at the point when a new kind of awareness is achieved as the solitary voice of one daughter dissolves into a "we" of sisters. Redel's charged and lyrical fictions enact a movement both away from a life and toward taking possession of a life. Over mountains, from hotel to hotel, in cars, on foot, we follow her determined journey to record her adventures as a first-generation American and as a writer of English prose.
Swoon
2003
What does it mean to be a woman--a lover, mother and artist? In "Swoon, Redel tackles the question of Eros as it animates domestic life. These are poems unafraid to embrace the sweetness of difficulty and the difficult sweetness of intimacy. Using short and extended lyric, prose poem, circular narrative, Redel refuses formal categorization, demanding of poetry a complex and textured vision of the female experience. "Swoon is a robustly sexy, intelligent, daring book of poems.
Loverboy
2001
LOVER BOY IS DYING TO COME OUT AND PLAY.The rules: Two weeks before he intends to slowly and sadistically kill his prey, Loverboy sends a collage of the future crime scene to the FBI. If the agents can solve the riddles of the collage in time, they can save the victim. Loverboy thinks that's more than fair. It's not his fault the feds have already failed five times.The players: Rosalind Carnow was last seen alone in her Las Vegas hotel room. No one knows where she is now--except Loverboy, and he's not saying a word. Imogen Page, an FBI agent with a painful past and uncertain future, may be the only person who can find her--and she is determined to decipher Loverboy's brilliant but deranged puzzle. If Loveboy lets her get that far.The game: Imogen matches wits with a homicidal mastermind, a fiercely intelligent opponent. Armed with her extraordinarily keen sense for detection, she must do for Rosalind what could not be done for Loverboy's previous victims: save her life.From the Trade Paperback edition.