A feral western set in 1940, narrated by an ostracized actress on an infernal journey of romance and revenge.
THE FIRST GIRL IN HELL
by Henry Hoke
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Winter/Spring 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
This novel is loosely inspired by one summer in the life of the author’s cousin Tallulah Bankhead. Her fictional stand-in Lucinda’s Hollywood career has ended, and she thinks she knows why. A combination of her queerness, the debauchery of her social life, and a personal vendetta has landed her in the infamous Doom Book, a burn list created in secret by the prudish ghouls behind the Hays Code restrictions on film of the 1930s. Fragmented into prose-poetic pages that mirror the notecards on which her politician father wrote speeches, Lucinda bitingly narrates her whirlwind road trip from a divorce ranch in Reno to a jailhouse in a crumbling ghost town, all the while pining for a woman who she thinks could turn her life around. She might not get sober, but she’ll settle for payback.
Henry Hoke is the author of several books, most recently Open Throat, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, and longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. He has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop, and lives in Virginia.

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