Stoned — Jill Hoffman

The long-awaited 2nd novel from Jill Hoffman Founding Editor of Mudfish/Box Turtle PressSTONED is about Maud Diamond, a 40-year-old woman with two children who is getting a divorce. She has had a colossal disappointment (having been jilted by a famous artist) and falling in love with a poor unknown artist (Kazimir Noble) assuages the disappointment but leads to other ills. The small son leaves home to live with his father; the daughter does phone sex from their new home. I'm the only one in this house earning any money, she shouts. It is about starting a literary journal called Wild Leek with the new boyfriend and moving downtown, while their relationship spirals downward from her pot-smoking and his alcoholism. It is for anyone who has been in love or lost love, been married, divorced, or lonely. It is about the satisfactions and deprivations of sex and drugs.This is the best book I read all year! And I don't say it because it was written by my teacher, the great Jill Hoffman and in the same Mudfish Writing Workshop where I wrote Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions, but because it's truly amazing. Even though it's 263 pages, I breezed through it, in fact every day I was looking forward to bedtime when I can read the next chapter. A real New Yorker, a woman writer struggling, broke, divorced, stoned while being a mother to two precarious children and a lover to an unemployed, eccentric artist who never makes it big. This book is poignant and hilarious and wise and addictive. When I was done with it, I somehow felt enlightened, like I knew more about life now than I did before that first page. It was an odd but amazing feeling.—Marina RubinFiction.