RENE STEINKE

No one in 1917 New York had ever encountered a woman like the Bar-oness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -- poet, artist, proto-punk rocker, sexual libertine, fashion avatar, and unrepentant troublemaker. When she wasnt stalking the streets of Greenwich Village wearing a brassiere made from tomato cans, she was enthusiastically declaiming her poems to sailors in beer halls or posing nude for Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp. In an era of brutal war, technological innovation, and cataclysmic change, the Baroness had resolved to create her own destiny -- taking the center of the Dadaist circle, breaking every bond of female propriety . . . and transforming herself into a living, breathing work of art.

Steinkes sense of this small Texas town, with its explosive and interconnected lives and deaths, is absolutely masterful.Elizabeth GilbertA big, moving novel of one tight-knit Texas community and the events that alter its residents lives forever.Friendswood, Texas, is a small Gulf Coast town of church suppers, oil rigs on the horizon, hurricane weather, and high school football games. When tragedy rears its head with an industrial leak that kills and sickens residents, it pulls on the common thread that runs through the community, intensifying everything. From a confused fifteen-year-old girl beset by visions, to a high school football star tormented by his actions, to a mother galvanized by the death of her teen daughter, to a morally bankrupt father trying to survive his mistakes, Rene Steinke explores what happens when families are trapped in the ambiguity of historys misstepswhen the actions of a few change the lives and well-being of many. Driving the narrative powerfully forward is the suspenseful question of the fates of four Friendswood families, and Steinkes striking insight and empathy. Inspired in part by the town where she herself grew up, this layered, propulsive, psychologically complex story is poignant proof that extreme public events, as catastrophic as they might seem, must almost always pale in comparison to the intimate personal experiences and motivations of grief, love, lust, ambition, anxiety, and regret.

La protegonista de la historia, la baronesa Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -poeta, modelo, artista miultimedia- sorprende en el inquieto Village neoyorquino de la década de 1920, donde vivían los artis