June Akers Seese - Böcker

June Akers Seese's second novel is about books and the people who read them: it's about a rare-book dealer and his mistress, set in that era when words like "mistress" were still used, and recalling the years when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud might share the same paragraph in an after-hours night spot. Seese writes movingly, tightly, without recourse to adjectives, from the gut and to the gut.

What Waiting Really Means is about emergencies that never reach the emergency room. It's about a woman named Mary with no last name who rides buses and smokes cigars and watches the wind blow her bedroom curtains into a frenzy. It's about cities: Detroit, New York and Atlanta. About older men. The kind who will hold you. And killers. And the boundaries they look for. The narrator is sure of one thing: Men who wear Brooks Brothers suits and pretend to read books are a step backward and not far enough back, at that. She's better off with her cigars at the Majestic Grill waiting while the rain beats on the windows.