The Girls

Zusatztext 41018686 Informationen zum Autor Emma Cline was the winner of The Paris Review ’s Plimpton Prize in 2014. She is from California. Klappentext Evie Boyd is desperate to be noticed. In the summer of 1969, empty days stretch out under the California sun. The smell of honeysuckle thickens the air and the sidewalks radiate heat. Until she sees them. The snatch of cold laughter. Hair, long and uncombed. Dirty dresses skimming the tops of thighs. Cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. The girls. And at the centre, Russell. Russell and the ranch, down a long dirt track and deep in the hills. Incense and clumsily strummed chords. Rumours of sex, frenzied gatherings, teen runaways. Was there a warning, a sign of things to come? Or is Evie already too enthralled by the girls to see that her life is about to be changed forever? Adapted from THE GIRLS by Emma Cline, available everywhere June 14th, 2016. I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.   I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. Then their jewelry catching the sun. The three of them were far enough away that I saw only the periphery of their features, but it didn’t matter—I knew they were different from everyone else in the park. Families milling in a vague line, waiting for sausages and burgers from the open grill. Women in checked blouses scooting into their boyfriends’ sides, kids tossing eucalyptus buttons at the feral-looking chickens that overran the strip. These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.   I studied the girls with a shameless, blatant gape: it didn’t seem possible that they might look over and notice me. My hamburger was forgotten in my lap, the breeze blowing in minnow stink from the river. It was an age when I’d immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short, and I saw right away that the black-haired one was the prettiest. I had expected this, even before I’d been able to make out their faces. There was a suggestion of otherworldliness hovering around her, a dirty smock dress barely covering her ass. She was flanked by a skinny redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought. As if dredged from a lake. All their cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park. Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by some feeling they couldn’t name. Women reaching for their boyfriends’ hands. The sun spiked through the trees, like always—the drowsy willows, the hot wind gusting over the picnic blankets—but the familiarity of the day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water.   1   It was the end of the sixties, or the summer before the end, and that’s what it seemed like, an endless, formless summer. The Haight populated with white-garbed Process members handing out their oat-colored pamphlets, the jasmine along the roads that year blooming particularly heady and full. Everyone was healthy, tan, and heavy with decoration, and if you weren’t, that was a thing, too—you could be some moon creature, chiffon over the lamp shades, on a kitchari cleanse that stained all your dishes with turmeric.   But that was all happening somewhere else, not in Petaluma with its low-hipped ranch houses, the covered wagon perpetually parked in front of the Hi-Ho Restaurant. The sun-scorched crosswalks. I was fourteen but looked much younger. People liked to say this to me. Connie swore I could pass for sixteen, but we told each other a lot of lies. We’d been friends all through junior high, Connie waiting for me outside classrooms as patient as a co...

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"Spellbinding . . . A seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry . . . [Emma] Cline gorgeously maps the topography of one loneliness-ravaged adolescent heart. She gives us the fictional truth of a girl chasing danger beyond her comprehension, in a Summer of Longing and Loss." - The New York Times Book Review

"[ The Girls reimagines] the American novel . . . Like Mary Gaitskill's Veronica or Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, The Girls captures a defining friendship in its full humanity with a touch of rock-memoir, tell-it-like-it-really-was attitude." - Vogue

"Debut novels like this are rare, indeed. . . . The most remarkable quality of this novel is Cline's ability to articulate the anxieties of adolescence in language that's gorgeously poetic without mangling the authenticity of a teenager's consciousness. The adult's melancholy reflection and the girl's swelling impetuousness are flawlessly braided together. . . . For a story that traffics in the lurid notoriety of the Manson murders, The Girls is an extraordinary act of restraint. With the maturity of a writer twice her age, Cline has written a wise novel that's never showy: a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror." - The Washington Post

"Outstanding . . . Cline's novel is an astonishing work of imagination-remarkably atmospheric, preternaturally intelligent, and brutally feminist. . . . Cline painstakingly destroys the separation between art and faithful representation to create something new, wonderful, and disorienting." - The Boston Globe

"Finely intelligent, often superbly written, with flashingly brilliant sentences, . . . Cline's first novel, The Girls , is a song of innocence and experience. . . . In another way, though, Cline's novel is itself a complicated mixture of freshness and worldly sophistication. . . . At her frequent best, Cline sees the world exactly and generously. On every other page, it seems, there is something remarkable-an immaculate phrase, a boldly modifying adverb, a metaphor or simile that makes a sudden, electric connection between its poles. . . . Much of this has to do with Cline's ability to look again, like a painter, and see (or sense) things better than most of us do." - The New Yorker

"Breathtaking . . . So accomplished that it's hard to believe it's a debut. Cline's powerful characters linger long after the final page." - Entertainment Weekly (Summer Must List)

"A mesmerizing and sympathetic portrait of teen girls." - People (Summer's Best Books)

"Cline's exquisite set pieces are the equal of her intricate unwinding of Evie's emotions . . . . The Girls isn't a Wikipedia novel, it's not one of those historical novels that congratulates the present on its improvements over the past, and it doesn't impose today's ideas on the old days. As the smartphone-era frame around Evie's story implies, Cline is interested in the Manson chapter for the way it amplifies the novel's traditional concerns. Pastoral, marriage plot, crime story-the novel of the cult has it all. You wonder why more people don't write them." - New York Magazine

"Hypnotizing . . . [Cline's] eagle-eyed take on the churnings and pitfalls of adolescence-longing to be wanted, feeling seen, getting discarded-rarely misses its mark. In truth, it's this aspect of The Girls . . . that stays with us after Evie's whirlwind story concludes." - San Francisco Chronicle

"Gorgeous, disquieting, and really, really good . . . [Cline's] prose conveys a kind of atmospheric dread, punctuated by slyly distilled observation. . . . What Cline does in The Girls is to examine, even dissect, these shifts between power and powerlessness that characterize a girl's coming of age. . . . Cline, born years after the events she explores, brings a fresh and discerning eye to both the specific, horrific crime at her book's center, one firmly lo

Product details

• Authors: Emma Cline
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.06.2016
• EAN: 9780812989861
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-8986-1
• No. of pages: 355
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 210 mm x 23 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature