Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders

"Julianna Baggott's devoted readers have long known that she is a genius who can do whatever she wants. But with Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders she has somehow outdone herself. This novel, about a woman who is stuck telling and living a family story that someone else has written and whose ending has been (maybe) lost forever, reminds me of the best work by the great Steven Millhauser: brainy, self-aware, tender, full of loss, but also full of grace and wonder. This is Julianna Baggott's best book, which is one way of saying it's one of the best books you'll read this year, or any other."

"Dazzling and ambitious, Julianna Baggott's gorgeously written new novel explores the miracles born out of desperation of three generations of women, all set against an astounding sweep of twentieth-century history. Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders is a mesmerizing tale of star-crossed love and of the dark secrets in a fracturing family, but it is also a profound meditation on stories themselves: how they create and trap us, how they protect us, and how, even amid great tragedy, they can sometimes make us bloom. This novel is so full of wonders that it leaves you haunted, amazed, and, like every great read, irrevocably changed."

"Julianna Baggott's richly imagined new novel is filled with laughter and heartbreak, and--most wonderfully--with the bright, pained release of stories, which flutter from these pages like living birds."

"All stories worth telling are love stories, a character says in Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders. This novel about a famous writer's lost manuscript, the complex legacy of family secrets, and--yes--a love story that unfolds across generations is inventive, playful, and deeply affecting."

Praise for Pure:

"Pure is not just the most extraordinary coming-of-age novel I've ever read, it is also a beautiful and savage metaphorical assessment of how all of us live in this present age. This is an important book by one of our finest writers." --Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner

"A great gorgeous whirlwind of a novel, boundless in its imagination. You will be swept away."--Justin Cronin, New York Times bestselling author of The Passage

Praise for The Madam

"A poet has transformed a piece of history into a luminous and epic piece of literature; it's as if John Irving and Djuna Barnes had collaborated, each bringing to the page the fiery best of their various gifts, the dark and lyrical and bizarre and sexual and comical and violent and mysterious and supremely heart-breaking spectacle of wide, wild lives rendered vividly before our eyes."

"Beautifully rendered, this story is as brave and unique and full of surprises as the madam portrayed within it."

"Few writers of the twenty-first century can rival the verve, the energy and the sheer delight in language of Julianna Baggott. Profoundly different from anything she has done before, The Madam is an extraordinary novel which will open a whole new phase of what already looks like a brilliant career."

Praise for The Miss America Family

"Julianna Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart."

Praise for Girl Talk

"For Baggott, cosmic irony is always in the details, the absurd gap between self-knowledge and behavioral excess ... [Her] brand of witty psychological observation is dark and corrosive... [she] has the knack for finding the oxymoronic in any situation."