Thomas Rayfiel – författare

“They say the city never sleeps. It does. Just before dawn you can hear it snore. Light hangs in the air, directionless, not yet pressed into rays. The smell of a hidden sea soaks through stone. The streets themselves have that booming emptiness of a shell held to the ear. Everyone is dreaming. It’s when I began to wander, that time in between.” For Eve, newly arrived from a religious colony in the heartland, the sidewalks of New York aren’t conveyors of humanity, they are sacred symbols, holy places. In the early morning, when her shift as an after-hours barmaid ends, she roams the deserted neighborhoods. It is a pilgrimage of sorts. Like so many before her, Eve has come to Manhattan to find herself among the lights and noise and sea of anonymous faces that make up the city. One night, her nocturnal meanderings lead her to a scene that will set her life on an unexpected course. She sees two people pressed against each other in the shadows of a building. Is it a mugging? A rape? Or is this what love looks like when viewed from the outside? Eve''s gaze locks into that of the struggling woman. There is a moment of connection, of silent communication, and then she is gone, the sound of her footsteps swallowed by the city, leaving behind a man . . . bleeding on the pavement. As Eve attempts to understand what she actually saw, she becomes involved with an up-and-coming artist who draws her to him even as his actions push her away; she meets a peculiar, father-like detective who pressures her to talk about a crime she now thinks may not have even happened; and she contemplates a marriage proposal that will give her a lot more than a last name. Everyone seems to want something from Eve; now if only she can figure out what, exactly, she has within her to give.With Eve In The City, Thomas Rayfiel has written a love letter to New York, from empty dawn streets to the glitter of Bloomingdale’s to the galleries of SoHo. Here is a smart, often dark-humored novel of a young woman’s search for self.From the Hardcover edition.

She’s still not quite sure how it happened. The biological part is fairly straightforward. It’s the wife-and-mother part that Eve can’t wrap her head around. Much to her surprise, Eve finds herself living in Brooklyn, married to a doctor named Harvey, and toting a young infant named Ann. How did she get here? And where is that maternal instinct that was supposed to have kicked in by now?From winter afternoons spent freezing at the Tot Spot to playgroups where she inadvertently tells the other mothers that Ann was an accident, Eve struggles to embrace motherhood and the yuppie accoutrements of her new life. It doesn’t help that her even-keeled husband spends long days working at the hospital, or that her own childhood in a religious cult was–by most people’s estimates–extremely odd. And when her ex-boyfriend (her gorgeous, toned, aloof ex-boyfriend) Mark reappears, Eve is thrown for a loop. Torn between the free-spirited Manhattanite she once was and the Snugli-wearing, baby-hoisting, stay-at-home body she now finds herself inhabiting, Eve realizes she must choose between the past and the present, lust and love, childhood and adulthood.“What’s sly, fine and real here is the way Rayfiel finally insinuates Baby into Eve’s slow-melting heart to form a bio-bond that becomes wondrously tight. Smart, dark, daring fare.” –Kirkus Reviews“It’s high time we got a novel such as Parallel Play–one that portrays a young mother as neither the Virgin Mary nor as Mommie Dearest. Eve is fumbling, flawed, funny, and——above all–utterly human. Tom Rayfiel has dared to tell it like it is in this triumphant novel.”–Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment “Wonderfully dreamlike and sharply, hilariously satirical . . . a truly remarkable and original creation.” –Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me“If Thomas Pynchon had suffered postpartum depression, he might have written a novel like Parallel Play. As Eve wanders through the first months of motherhood, her observations are hilarious, eerie, and unforgettable. This is a must-read for lovers of smart fiction and flummoxed mothers.”–Amanda Eyre Ward, author of How to Be LostFrom the Trade Paperback edition.