the Lie starring Rita Hayworth in paperback

"Disturbing and haunting --- and brilliantly written... I have a feeling that Fredica Wagman is one of America's best novelists..."

— Jesse Kornbluth - The Head Butler

"The house of literature needs to keep a room for books like The Lie... books willing to examine life’s blackest places and the poor souls inhabiting them."

— Diane Leach - January Magazine

With this novel, Wagman realizes Kafka's famous dictum that "a book must be the axe to break the frozen sea within us.
Click Here for a synopsis of the Lie.
Click Here to read an essay about why I chose Rita Hayworth for the Lie.

Playing House: A Novel Now Available in a 35th Anniversary Edition

"A kind of unsparing honesty that makes you shiver but also stop to admire."

— Washington Post

"Jarring, shocking, brilliantly written, and surprisingly funny."

— The Philadelphia Inquirer

When Playing House appeared in 1973, Publishers Weekly hailed it, "A probing descent into madness that will fascinate the same audience that appreciated I Never Promised You a Rose Garden." This nationally bestselling story of one woman's struggle with the lasting effects of a childhood sexual relationship with her brother shocked American readers, and is a literary work of enduring quality and value.

In his foreword Philip Roth writes, "The traumatized child; the institutionalized wife; the haunting desire; the ghastly business of getting through the day — what is striking about Wagman's treatment of these contemporary motifs is the voice of longing in which the heroine shamelessly confesses to the incestuous need that is at once her undoing and her only hope."

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