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A Novel
by Katherine Packert Burke
A profound and piercing tribute to messy webs of queer friendship and to what is left behind in transition.
Everything in Edith's life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead.
Still Life volleys between the present and recent past, chronicling the lives of three women―one cis, two trans, all forever entwined. Edith was a bumbling "boy" pre-transition, in love with Tessa, enamored by Val, and drowning in Boston. She and Tessa called each other Joni and Joan, an homage to the musical backdrop of their fledgling adulthood. When Edith decides to leave behind the East Coast for graduate school, she begins a yearslong journey away from the person she loves most and toward a hazy new understanding of who she will become.
In the present, Edith visits Boston feeling like a failure of a writer, a failure of a girl, and wracked with guilt over Val's death. Val, the intrepid wanderer, had drifted in and out of Edith's life, arriving in Texas with estrogen pills and wisdom from a life on the road. A sometimes lover, sometimes trans mentor, Val was everything Tessa wasn't and everything Edith needed. Home alone in Texas, she is left loveless and exhausted as the state slowly chips away at trans rights. Was Val's fatal car crash Edith's fault? Would she have stayed put if Edith had loved her better?
Katherine Packert Burke's debut novel unfolds like a rusty pocketknife, jagged and lacerating. Infused with pop culture, cigarettes, and Sondheim, Still Life traces the lives of three friends, authentic and evolving, loving and cruel, here and gone, to craft a tableau of modern womanhood.
"Readers will devour this visceral story of desire, love, and self-discovery." —Publishers Weekly
"Wry and intimate and real, this character study is worth lingering over." —Kirkus Reviews
"Still Life is vibrantly, brilliantly alive―by turns steely and delicate, wintry and warm, tart and bittersweet, elegiac and joyous. Just like the music and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim (this novel's patron saint, quietly ever-present), Katherine Packert Burke's writing is cerebral and exquisitely precise yet brimming with feeling." ―James Frankie Thomas, author of Idlewild
"Katherine Packert Burke's Still Life is everything you want from a Künstlerroman: smart, sexy, funny, sly, and exceptionally queer. With biting insights and heartbreaking attention, this debut captures the daunting thrill of becoming an artist while becoming yourself." ―Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
"Katherine Packert Burke has written such a warm book on red-state trans loneliness and the very real loves, cis and trans, that circle it. I love the jokes and nicknames; the riffs on Paul Cézanne, Stephen Sondheim, and Gossip Girl; and the care with which its three core characters face their losses and departures. I loved them―and more importantly, Burke does too. You'll feel it." ―Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun
This information about Still Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Katherine Packert Burke is a graduate of the Clarion Writer's Workshop in San Diego and the MFA program at the University of Alabama. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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