Glass

From the acclaimed author of Firmin and The Cry of the Sloth—a widow, aging and alone, tells her side of the story.

Tasked with writing the preface to a reissue of her late husband’s long-out-of-print novel, Edna is unexpectedly asked to take care of a vacationing neighbor’s pet rat, an aquarium of fish, and an apartment full of potted plants. Sitting at her typewriter day after day, her mind drifts from one thing to another in a Proustian marathon of introspection. What eventually unfolds, as if by accident, is the story of a marriage and a portrait of a mind pushed to its limits. The reader is never quite certain if Edna’s preface is an homage to her late husband or an act of belated revenge. Is she the cultured and hypersensitive victim of a crass and brutally ambitious husband? Or was Clarence the long-suffering caretaker of a neurotic and delusional wife?

The unforgettable characters in Savage’s two hit novels Firmin and The Cry of the Sloth garnered worldwide critical acclaim. In Edna, once again Sam Savage has created a character marked by contradiction—simultaneously appealing and exasperating, comical and tragic.

Publication date: September 13, 2011

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.7

Page count: 210 pages

ISBN: 9781566892735

Sam Savage is the best-selling author of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, The Cry of the Sloth, Glass, and The Way of the Dog. A native of South Carolina, Savage holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University. He was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the PEN L.L. Winship Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award. Savage resides in Madison, Wisconsin.

“Typically, memoir gives us the emotional high points, but Savage’s Edna inverts that: She writes loneliness and tedium, the bits and pieces that are hard to look at, or that typically wind up on the cutting room floor.”

—The Los Angeles Times

“A dazzling, graceful novel. . . . Glass gives us both a life story told well and tantalizingly in unspooled snippets, and a thoughtful rumination on the nature of late-life reflection itself.”

—The Star Tribune

“Glass is a fantastic experiment in perspective and an oddly memorable book.”

—January Magazine

“Sam Savage creates some of the most original, unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction.”

—Poets & Writers

“Introspection is at the heart of this new novel from Savage, which effectively defines that jewel of a word, velleity (the lowest level of compulsion to act, a slight impulse to do something).”

—Library Journal, starred review

“Savage’s decision to use the point of view of an unreliable narrator will capture the attention of readers of literary fiction. The wry, bizarre humor will keep it.”

—Booklist

“Evocative, poetic, and compelling.”

—New York Journal of Books

“Glass transforms through Edna’s pathology (and Savage’s relentless vision) into a deeply felt exploration of memory, of what it means to outlive the sources of one’s suffering.”

—BookPage

“[Glass is] Sam Savage’s examination of the truth of memory, the effects of self-imposed solitude, and the churning verbal mechanics of writer’s mind.”

—Shelf Awareness