The Uses Of Enchantment:a Novel

Description

One Autumn day in 1985, sixteen-year-old Mary Veal vanishes from her Massachusetts prep school. A few weeks later she reappears unharmed and with little memory of what happened to her--or at least little that she is willing to share. Was Mary abducted, or did she fake her disappearance? This question haunts Mary's family, her psychologist, even Mary herself. Weaving together three narratives, The Uses of Enchantment conjures a spell in which the hallucinatory power of a young woman’s sexuality, and her desire to wield it, has devastating consequences for all involved.

About the Author

Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and co-editor ofThe Believermagazine. She has been published inThe Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2,Esquire,Story,Zoetrope All-Story, andMcSweeney's Quarterly. Her novels includeThe Mineral Palace(2000),The Effect of Living Backwards(2003) andThe Uses of Enchantment(2006) andThe Vanishers(2012).She was born and grew up in Portland, Maine, before attending Dartmouth College. She later went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University.She wrote the article "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" (subtitled: "A Call For A New Era Of Experimentation, and a Book Culture That Will Support It") in the debut issue ofThe Believer, a publication which attempts to avoid snarkiness and "give people and books the benefit of the doubt."In 2005, she told the New York Times culture writer A.O. Scott how'd she decided onThe Believer's tone: "I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't." She added her own aim as book critic would be "to endow something with importance, by treating it as an emotional experience."She has also written short stories, such as "The Santosbrazzi Killer", which was published in Harper's Magazine.Julavitz currently lives in Maine and Manhattan with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and their children