Fiction
Billie
is a
Senior at East Winston High when she tutors Ted, the star of the
basketball team.
But Ted has a drinking problem. He also has
a minor fetish,
a request that leads Billie on a
vicarious search for herself through the characters in the books she loves to “plow through.”
But Billie’s new sexual awareness takes her
far beyond Ted,
into the lives of East Winston’s
troubled, suburban angst, where, for one
early 1980’s
school season, she learns the difference
between a storied life and reality.
The
heroine is a hoops-shooting, Madame Bovary-reading American kid trying
to figure it all out.
As we follow Billie in and out of love,
limning with her
the edges of despair and hope, Warsh leads
us deep into the “hum of human machinery”, a
territory
where all but essentials are weeded out.
Part bildungsroman, part commentary on
American life in the
80s, Ted's Favorite Skirt is
a
trenchant, lovely wonder. Laird
Hunt, author of The Impossibly
vicarious search for herself through the characters in the books she loves to “plow through.”
Lewis
Warsh
Lewis Warsh is
the author of two novels, Agnes & Sally and
A Free
Man, two books of stories, Money Under the
Table and
Touch of the Whip, and numerous books of poems,
including The Origin of the World and Avenue of
Escape.
His most recent books are Debtor’s Prison, a book-length
poem
in collaboration with video artist Julie
Harrison, and
The Angel
Hair Anthology, co-edited with Anne Waldman.
He has received grants
for his fiction
and poetry
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
New York
Foundation for the Arts and The Fund for
Poetry. In
1994
he received the James Shestack award from
The
American Poetry Review.
He is editor and publisher
of United
Artists Books and has taught at
SUNY Albany, The New
School, Naropa University and The Poetry Project.
He is
presently on the faculty of Long Island University in
Brooklyn.