![]() Tender Is the Night is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language” (San Francisco Chronicle). ![]() The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern. The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden-her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother-her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother-tastes of despair and desperation. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.
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