A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT by Cynthia Weiner (the words Freud used to describe a cocaine high) is Sweet Bitter meets The Girls with some Girl, Interrupted thrown in.

A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT
by Cynthia Weiner
Crown, TBD

Set against the summer of 1986 in NYC, beginning with the gruesome razor blade slashing of an aspiring model outside a midtown bar in June, and ending with the strangulation of an 18 year old girl in Central Park whose half-clothed body was discovered behind the Metropolitan Museum – Nina Jacobs starts her summer with two goals: to lose her virginity before she goes to college, and avoid provoking her mother’s depression fueled rages at home. Temping meaningless jobs by day, and hanging out at Flanagans, the bar on the upper east side that is a magnet for the private school set, during this summer Nina will discover just how dangerous the world is for women, but also that she is tougher than anyone, including herself, thinks.

Cynthia Weiner’s short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, Open City, and Epiphany, and one of them, « Boyfriends, » received a Pushcart Prize. She has an M.F.A. from Brown University and is the Assistant Director of The Writers Studio in New York where she teaches fiction writing. A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT was inspired by Weiner’s teenage years on the Upper East Side in the 80s.