Jill Ciment Libros

Gloria, a modern "snake-oil" saleswoman, travels from town to town with her teenaged daughter, Kim, but her life abruptly changes when Kim falls in love with Arthur, a gentle widower, thirty years her senior

A 52 year-old photographer and a 41 year-old anatomy professor are jurors sequestered during a sensational three-week trial: a toddler murdered by one of his twin sisters. At the court appointed cut-rate motel off the interstate, they fall into an intense, furtive affair, but it is only during deliberations that the lovers learn they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens. After the trial, the photographer returns to her much older husband amidst an ongoing media frenzy over the case. But the judge has received an anonymous letter about the affair, and she is preparing to release the jurors names. From that point on, the photographer's "one last dalliance before she is too old" takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences, as The Body in Question moves to its affecting, powerful, and surprising conclusion.*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ***

In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, Jill Ciment reflects on how their love ignited and interrogates her 1996 memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself whether she told the whole truth back then. What did truth look like to her in the era of love-bead curtains, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility of May-December romance? With new understanding about the imbalance of power between an older man and a minor girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at age ninety-three.

Ein bildstarker literarischer Thriller voller unerwarteter Wendungen um einen spektakulären Prozess und eine verhängnisvolle Affäre Die Jugendliche Anca Butler ist angeklagt, ihren Babybruder getötet zu haben. Fraglich ist jedoch, ob sie als Autistin überhaupt schuldfähig und ihre Zwillingsschwester als Zeugin glaubwürdig ist. Die Jurymitglieder werden über Wochen in Gerichtssaal und Motel abgekapselt; unter ihnen eine verheiratete Fotografin, die sich – »auf der Suche nach einem letzten Abenteuer, bevor sie zu alt dafür ist« – auf eine Affäre mit einem Mitgeschworenen einlässt. Schon bald finden die beiden sich in einem ausweglosen Konflikt aus körperlichem Begehren und moralischen Bedenken wieder – in einem bildstarken literarischen Thriller, der kein Wort zu viel enthält.