Simon's dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen 's author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg's. It's 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island.īut Simon's first assignment-editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the firm's failing finances-makes him question the cost of admission.

But no matter how you turn it, The Vixen offers an illuminating reflection on the slippery nature of truth in America, then and now.'- Washington PostĬritically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose returns with a dazzling new novel set in the glamorous world of 1950s New York publishing, the story of a young man tasked with editing a steamy bodice-ripper based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg-an assignment that will reveal the true cost of entering that seductive, dangerous new world. 'Depending on the light, it's either a very funny serious story or a very serious funny story. The gift of her work to a reader is to create for us what she creates for her protagonist: the subtle unfolding, the moment-by-moment process of discovery as we read and change, from not knowing and even not wanting to know or care, to seeing what we had not seen and finding our way to the light of the ending.'-Amy Bloom, New York Times Book Review

'No one states problems more correctly, more astutely, more amusingly and more uncomfortably than Francine Prose. Named one of the best books of 2021 by NPR, The Washington Post, and Financial Times

The vixen novel