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Twilight Sleep

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( 1,454 ratings, 167 reviews)
Brief Description
Mrs. Pauline Manford is a busy woman, as any upstanding New York society lady should be. To manage a modern household is to hold the family together, staying on trend with all things helpful, but her daughter has horrible taste in married men, her ex-husband is... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Mrs. Pauline Manford is a busy woman, as any upstanding New York society lady should be.

To manage a modern household is to hold the family together, staying on trend with all things helpful, but her daughter has horrible taste in married men, her ex-husband is unwell, and her son is struggling to forge a career for himself while his postpartum wife refuses to settle down from lavish partying. Pauline can't decide if she should bob her hair, redecorate, or get a face lift, and she surely doesn't have time to notice her current husband's wandering eye as anything other than harmless flirtations.

When a rakish Italian actor bound for Hollywood and a scandal with the local wellness guru threaten to tear her perfectly constructed life apart, Pauline moves on to new spiritually medicinal treatments, and the Manfords must navigate the fraught tensions that bind them together. Hopefully, a vacation from NYC's ruthless grind to their quiet country house will deter any further worries.

Twilight Sleep (1927), named for the early anaesthetic that predates epidural and induces memory loss, is Edith Wharton's oft-forgotten novel of modern motherhood and the pressures that lead women to reconstruct or completely escape their lives. Sharp and humorous, it feels as relevant today as it did in the 1920s.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781961884229

Publisher: Unnamed Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 23 January 2025

Country: United States

Imprint: Smith &Taylor Classics

Illustration: Illustrations

Contributors:

  • Introduction by Brandon Taylor
  • Introduction by Allison Miriam Smith

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 127.0mm

Height: 197.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 295

About the Author

Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York 'aristocracy' to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics.

Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.

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