Finally back in print, Jane Vandenburgh's brilliant debut-startlingly idiosyncratic, intelligent, funny, and painfully moving . It's southern California in the early Sixties, and Charlotte is a teenager, which is bad enough. She also has strange grandparents, with whom she lives, a schizophrenic ventriloquist alcoholic mother who appears and disappears regularly from her life, and only vague information about the father who died before Charlotte was born.With so much craziness in the family, Charlotte figures, whether it's nature or nurture, she's doomed. In Failure to Zigzag, Jane...

Fire, flood, and earthquake -- the typical California disaster scenario pales in comparison to the calamity waiting to occur when Anna meets Alex in The Physics of Sunset. Fellow Easterners-in-exile-to-Berkeley, the almost-divorced poet Anna and the very married architect Alex start an affair that soon threatens their formerly well-ordered lives. Science, sex, and the clash between East and West (coasts) form the nucleus of this blisteringly smart satire of contemporary mores and morals.

Jane Vandenburgh's life began normally enough. Born into "a certain kind of family"--affluent, white, Protestant--she came of age during a time when the sexual revolution was sweeping our cultural landscape. Her father, an architect with a prominent Los Angeles firm, was arrested several times for being in gay bars during the 1950s. He was sent to a clinic to be "cured" of his homosexuality; he committed suicide when she was nine. Her mother was a Bohemian who believed that she was glamorous and talented and could write her own rules for the way she lived her life. Convinced that she was...

Jane Vandenburgh, the author of two highly acclaimed novels and a recent memoir, offers aspiring writers the tools to create powerful and unique novels filled not only with good writing but also dynamic storytelling.
Architecture of the Novel is an ambitious blueprint for writers, one that reveals the underlying machinery that propels a plot that is dynamic, coherent, and interesting.
Architecture of the Novel derives from the many years Vandenburgh has spent teaching the craft of fiction writing. Her method points to the elemental nature of narrative: A story consists of...

The author calls this "a true romance," saying, it's the part of her personal history she, being superstitious, was almost afraid to write. She'd grown up accustomed to bad luck, but had - by accident or miracle - survived her own circumstances: being orphaned, her own misspent youth, the chaos of a broken marriage. She'd more than survived, she'd even triumphed and had awakened into a kind of charmed splendor to find herself living in a white marble city with storybook castles, knowing famous people, being invited to the White House to listen to her husband discuss Yeats with the President...