Live Girls

by Beth Nugent

Book Overview

Following her critically acclaimed collection of short stories, City of Boys, Beth Nugent brings her dark and eerie vision to a powerful first novel. Live Girls is the story of Catherine, in her... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067974424X
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Have a seat in the parlor.

I was at a thrift store and took a chance. I read the back of the book and I must admit, the anorexic drag queen lured me in.I bought this book for way under a dollar and it has been the best change I have ever spent.This book is highly entertaining. The descriptions that Beth Nugent uses are so sad and dark and beautiful. These descriptions haunt and delight me. Grotesque and gorgeous.This book touched me in so many ways. I found myself in a lot of the characters, from Catherine to Jerome. Live Girls does paint a depressing picture but don't let that throw you off of this book. There is so much more.This book is like reading a diary. We learn so much about Catherine's psyche. I keep letters I find in the street and pictures I find at thrift stores. I sit and think of these people's lives. I even carry a man's drivers license I found on my way home one day in my purse. I love to learn about people and although Catherine isn't real, I've had a wonderful time learning about her.The characters are very real and you do feel sorry for them. Read this book with an open mind. Beth Nugent is an excellent writer and I look forward to all of her books. Take a chance and read this book.

Nugent is a subtle, powerful writer!

Live Girls is a novel suffused with an unforgettable atmosphere; the world it conjures can't easily be forgotten. Anybody who cares about the craft of writing (particularly aspiring writers), should read this book to learn how much can be done with a first person, intimate narrative, without 'writerly' showing off or horrible sentimentality. Yes, it's dark and creepy, but people who criticise the book on this basis seem to miss the point completely. I wish Nugent would write another book. Is there another book I don't know about?

"He reaches for me with his large wooden hands..."

Live Girls is a haunting, seering work of fiction which reads like someone you may know's journal - someone who is lost but is loathe to acknowledge that. And understandably for Catherine, our passive aggressive anti-heroine who makes up lie after lie on the spot, stitching remnants of other people's lives into the decaying fabric of her own. I was completely engrossed in the reading of this novel - it is so utterly numb as to be brutally, painfully honest - so honest that you laugh, because you recognize life as it really is. And Nugent's ability to invite the reader in, yet not offer them more than they are willing to bargain for, is perhaps the most exciting element of this book: there are those who hate it and say it's about nothing, and those who declare it the most depressing thing they've ever read and those who say it is packed with energy and thought and deed and idea and still others who are just content to glimpse this poor girl's life. We can't help Catherine. We wonder why she doesn't just get on with her life and we wonder if what she is doing to herself is a self-inflicted punishment or just the result of someone who never knew how to make the right choices because she's too afraid of life - afraid like her sister would want her to be, afraid and with no hope of acquiring any happiness whatsoever. I found this book to be refreshing, actually. Different. Unassuming. A fantastic read, by all means. Her prose is magnetic, it pulls you in. Just be careful not to fall into the world of her characters who are lost people, fragile at best, with facial bruises and sick cats and dying mothers and spiders living in their hearts and little wooden children running in the yard, and city jobs where they trap pigeons all day long....Live Girls is a triumph. I look forward to more from this writer.

Darkly beautiful

As an aspiring writer I have been on a perpetual search for something that "grabs me." My search ended when I discovered Beth Nugent. This novel paints a captivating portrait of a lost soul. Reading her stories, and this particular novel, is like watching an Ingmar Bergman film. It's like watching blue shadows dance upon the wall. She is head to head with Joyce Carol Oates -- in my humble opinion. --Julie Bickley

The state of the nation

Though I am in my early twenties, I read a lot of contemporary literary fiction. Of the novels I have read in the past year or so, Live Girls really stands out for me as one of the strongest. Far from pointless or boring or depressing, Live Girls is a narrowing and beautiful representation of life for (those I hesitate to use the term) Gen X-ers. Live Girls is vividly written and genuinely moving. It presents some of the cynicism and isolation and depression that deeply effects our time. A perfect novel