Best Selling Books by Jessica Hagedorn

Hagedorn's remarkable play based on her best-selling novel.

One of Jessica Hagedorn's most daring novels—“a deft and complex tale of corruption, fealty, and integrity” (The Baltimore Sun) In a Philippines of desperate beauty and rank corruption, two seemingly unrelated events occur: the discovery of an ancient lost tribe living in a remote mountainous area and the arrival of a celebrity-studded, American film crew, there to make an epic Vietnam War movie. But the lost tribe may be a clever hoax and the Hollywood movie seems doomed as the cast and crew continue to self-destruct in a cloud of drugs and ego. As the consequences of these events play out, four unforgettable characters—a wealthy, iconoclastic playboy; a woman ensnared in the sex industry; a Filipino-American writer; and a jaded actor—find themselves drawn irrevocably together in this lavish, sensual portrait of a nation in crisis.

A bold new novel about the intersection of art, love, fame, and money from the acclaimed author of Dogeaters. Jessica Hagedorn's edgy and entertaining new novel centers on the lives of two women who are neighbors in Manhattan's West Village. Mimi Smith is a filmmaker of low-budget slasher movies in search of new material. Her neighbor Eleanor Delacroix is a legendary writer of erotic fiction, now nearing eighty and addicted to cocaine and gin. Their personal and artistic lives begin to collide in unexpected ways as Eleanor grieves over the recent death of her live-in lover, the renowned painter Yvonne Wilder, and as Mimi deals with the challenges presented by her newly sober brother Carmelo; her drug-dealing boyfriend, who has mysteriously disappeared; and her wayward fourteen-year-old daughter, Violet. Looming over all these characters is the ghost of Agnes-an "illegal" and cousin of Mimi's who might have been murdered by her New Jersey employers. Toxicology is a dark yet playful exploration of money, desire, mortality, and the connection between creativity and self-destruction.

Hagedorn muses about love and sex, and probes with wry humor and sharp social satire the heart-and hearbreaks-of the immigrant experience. "Jessica Hagedorn is one of the best of a new generation of writers who are making American language new and who in the process are creating a new American Literature."-Russell Banks "[Hagedorn] sees her native land from both near and far, with ambivalent love, the only kind of love worth writing about."-John Updike Jessica Hagedorn is a performance artist, poet, playwright, and formerly a commentator on NPR. Her novel, Dogeaters, won an American Book Award. Other books include the groundbreaking Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and The Gangster of Love.

College was supposed to be a time of excitement and freedom. For one young woman, however, it became the source of entrapment when her anxiety disorder spiraled out of control and threatened to end her life. Desperate for a way out, she turned to an unusual place for help and ended up discovering the one thing that would allow her to find happiness...a parrot named Ben. Through the challenges and laughter of living with a parrot, Jessica found a way to live life once again.