Suite for Barbara Loden [Paperback]

A moving, subtle novel about the need to create. —Le Monde [A] mesmerizing work of unexpected beauty. —Book Riot Assigned to write the entry aboutWanda(1970), Barbara Loden's art-house movie, for a film encyclopedia, Léger let herself get lost. The result gracefully melds criticism, fiction, and autobiography, and is a powerful example of how summary, channeled through the most personal of perspectives, can be a form of art. —Harper's Magazine When I set out to reviewSuite for Barbara Loden, I realized I didn't have much to say, exactly, beyond what Léger says. I wanted to show how she shows how one woman's experience is filtered through another, collapses into another. And I wanted to show how we (women) connect with Wanda—even extraordinary, glamorous, intellectual women like Léger or Loden, and even women generations younger than Wanda, like myself—how the book sucks in every woman who approaches it. —The Rumpus What is initially Léger's explicit hesitance to create a biography that does not do Loden justice is transformed into her own story, one of how the lives of women seep into one another. —Los Angeles Review of Books [A] beautiful and intimate mixed portrait of Loden,Wanda, and Léger. —Small Press Book Review Moving descriptions of Loden's performance inWandadot the narration as Léger struggles to reveal joy or pain Loden may have hidden, beyond her early work as a pin-up girl, her marriage to Elia Kazan, and a 1964 Tony Award for her role in Arthur Miller'sAfter the Fall. Translators Lehrer and Menon give Léger's voice immense verve in English as her small task becomes an obsession. —Kirkus Reviews Inventive and affecting, it takes both the novel and the biography to new and interesting places. —