Enlarge Image
To embed a link to this book on your own website, please copy the code below.
Maidenhead
By Tamara Faith Berger
Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012)
Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013)
Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida – a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family ... Read more
Overview
Winner of the The Believer Book Award (2012)
Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award (2013)
Myra, naive and curious, is on a family vacation to the southernmost tip of Florida – a mangy Key West full of Spring Breakers. Here, suffering through the embarrassments of a family on the verge of splitting up, she meets Elijah, a charismatic Tanzanian musician who seduces her at the edge of the tourist zone. Myra longs to lose her virginity to Elijah, and is shocked to learn he lives with Gayl, a secretive and violent woman with a strange power over him. Myra and her family return to an unnamed, middle-class, grey Canadian city and she falls in with a pot-smoking, intellectual anarchist crowd. When Gayl and Elijah travel north and infiltrate Myra’s life, she walks willingly into their world: Myra continues to experiment sexually with Elijah, while Gayl plays an integral part in the increasingly abject games. Maidenhead traverses the desperate, wild spaces of a teenage girl’s self-consciousness. How does a girl feel scared? What is she scared of? And how does telling yourself not to be scared really work? As Myra enters worlds unfamiliar of sex, porn, race and class, she explores territories unknown in herself.
Tamara Faith Berger
Tamara Faith Berger was born in Toronto. She wrote porn stories for a living and attempted to make dirty films before publishing her first book, Lie With Me, in 1999. It was made into a film in 2004. In 2001, A Woman Alone at Night was published. These two novels were collected in Little Cat. Her third book, Maidenhead, won the 2012 Believer Book Award. She is also the author of Kuntalini and is writing for film and television. She currently lives in Toronto.
Reviews
'Tamara Faith Berger has been writing challenging and sexy books for more than a decade, but this novel is her best yet. She handles race and class as deftly as she does the effects of internet pornography on our sex lives and our moral lives — subjects that might be turned into excuses for sermons, but which she renders in original and shocking ways. ' – The Believer
'Maidenhead is a mesmerizing and important novel, lying somewhere between the wilds of Judy Blume, Girls Gone Wild and Michel Foucault. It’s a thrilling, enlightening and really hot place to be. '
– Sheila Heti, Globe and Mail
'Maidenhead is a masterpiece: a richly layered, complexly rendered, rhythmically written, and brilliantly executed meditation on power, desire, and consciousness. '
– Quill & Quire
'Maidenhead is by turns creepy and seductive and unlike anything you’ll read this spring. '
– Fashion Magazine
Reader Reviews
Tell us what you think!
Sign Up or Sign In to add your review or comment.
Related Blog Posts
Gift Guide Week: Casey Plett
Lambda-Literary-Award winner Casey Plett is our final Gift Guide recommender this week with five thoughtful must-read titles for everyone from queer kids of colour seeking gay and lesbian fiction to road-trip strangers you never forget.
Happy 3rd Birthday, All Lit Up!
Happy birthday to us! Usually, we ring in our big day with a look ahead to books we can't wait to read in Fall, but since we've already tackled that, we're counting to three with:
- Looking back on some fave memories;
- Sharing 20 books we've loved over the years (+ making ... Read more
Sisters are doin’ it for themselves: Creating the cover for Sarah Barmak’s Closer
Managing Editor of Coach House Books Heidi Waechtler shares with us the ins and outs of making the cover of journalist Sarah Barmak's new book, Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality. Combining reclaimed feminine craft, the Exploded Views series geometry, ... Read more
All Lit Up First Birthday: Looking Back, Looking Ahead
It’s our First Birthday! When we’re not partaking in the undoubtedly sticky nightmare that is “ cake smashing” today, we’re taking both: a look back at some of our favourite posts that went down during our first year, and a glance forward at fall books we’re just ... Read more
The Days of Meta-Meta: Fictional Characters and What They Might like to Read
Sometimes, there’s nothing quite like sitting down with your favourite fictional character and imagining what happens after their stories are over—after the last page of that book is turned, after the credits roll, after that series finale has answered some of your questions ... Read more
This Week in Book Events: February 16-22
Not one, but TWO events this week feature pie, and one is as American as apple pie (because it's in the United States of America). Need we say more?
Are you hosting an event featuring an author whose titles are available on All Lit Up? Send the event details, including author, ... Read more
Mavis Gallant, Marriage, and a Complicated Feminism
Gallant's was not a conventional feminism by our standards of the term, even when we adjust our expectations for the context of her midcentury tableaus. She was critical of the economic-psychological transactions bound up in romantic relationships, and especially of their tendency ... Read more
- Dimensions 160 pages, 5.17 x 7.8 x 0.59 in
- Published April 15, 2012
- Publisher Coach House Books
- Category Fiction
- Keywords Erotica , Literary
Other titles by Tamara Faith Berger
Get the All Lit Up Newsletter!
We'll send you bi-monthly updates to keep you in the loop on the best of our blog, special campaigns and offers, AND news on the latest in literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry from indie publishers across Canada.
You May Also Like
