Paula Bomer – författare

A woman and her niece are bound together and driven apart by loves, desires, frustrations, and addictions. East Berlin, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eva, a retired nurse, makes it through her day on a combination of stimulants and sleeping pills, wine and brandy. She finds fleeting joy in American jazz and blues records, and occasional visits from her married lover. Her friendly teenaged neighbor is her closest companion. Then her American niece, Maggie, arrives in Berlin. Eva is thrilled—Maggie is just the companion she’s been seeking. But happiness begins to slide from Eva’s grasp as Maggie’s own fierce drug addiction reveals itself. Tante Eva is a story that deftly takes in decades of family life and German history, estrangement, joys, and disappointments. It is a portrait of East Berlin in the years after the Wall came down, and of an overlooked woman pursuing happiness and sexual pleasure. It is the finest book yet from Paula Bomer, an author whose work Jonathan Franzen describes as “some of the rawest and most urgent writing I can remember encountering.”

An Untalented Mr. Ripley, a Dumb American Psycho: A young man combines boundless self-confidence with perpetual failure and ineptitude as he tries to manipulate his way into a better life, preying on women in New York City in the early ’90s.Robert Doughten Savile, a.k.a. “Doughty,” is the son of a once-wealthy, now hard-up family from Darien, Connecticut. Convinced of his own genius, Doughty lives in a perpetual cloud of delusion, cruising through life on the sheer force of his own sense of entitlement. After a brief, lackluster stint in college, he heads to the New York City of the early ’90s to make his fortune.He cons his way from a bed at the YMCA into the posh Soho loft of a middle-aged book editor, even as he pursues a young bartender, and abuses and gaslights both women. He spins elaborate tales about his imaginary high-power job in real estate while, in reality, he passes his days watching comedy specials on VHS, smoking crack in Tompkins Square Park, and engaging in occasional sex work in the restrooms of Grand Central Station. His many failures, however, only serve to sharpen his one true gift: Doughty is a skilled predator, and the damage he inflicts on the women around him is savage and remorseless.