A Woman Named Drown

Hailed by Time as an extravagantly comic novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through Americas South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actresscum-pool shark On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a woman named Drown. He moves in with her and just as quickly begins encountering her strange compatriots. Before he knows it, theyre heading farther south togetherto Floridawhere the data that the dropout scientist is collecting from lifes laboratory is about to get quite contradictory. Richly influenced by offbeat literary giant Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powells A Woman Named Drown offers readers a smorgasbord of literary strangenessa surreal series of adventures in which nothing muchand yet everythinghappens at once.