After Claude

Praise

“Like our best women writers (Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates), Owens is not afraid to take risks…Owens is a highly intelligent writer and a fiendishly sardonic one–to the extent that her outrageous wit rescues her freaky Jewish anti-heroine from becoming a pain in the Asphalt Jungle. On every page wisecracks explode like anti-personnel mines. We laugh, nervously perhaps, but often.”  —Newsweek

“One of the earliest portraits of the female antihero, a sort of distaff Notes From Underground. It was very funny” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

“A very funny book by an exhilarating talent.” —The New York Times

“…like watching a woman depilate with an acetylene touch.” —Newsweek

“Good enough to have convulsed the late Oscar Levant, barbed, bitchy and hilariously sour.” —Kenneth Tynan

“Spiky with mockery, carbon steel wit and mature observation.” —Village Voice

“Owens, under the name of Harriet Daimler, was a prominent Parisian pornographer for Olympia Press…[who] as ‘Harriet Daimler’, became one of Girodias’s most celebrated pornographers, someone who struggled ‘against her impossible tendency to write more explicitly than the courts will tolerate’” —Bloomsbury Magazine

“To characterize After Claude as the inevitable lightly veiled autobiography of a ‘first’ novel is to deny Ms. Owens her due both as a  savagely accurate reporter of the current Greenwich Village-Chelsea Hotel scene, and as a gallow humorist of major order...After Claude…is said, with biting verve and accuracy for New York that Mary McCarthy and her reliance on ‘facts’ would well envy.” —Eleanor Rackow Widmer, Arts and Society

“Hilariously brutal…an addictive, prickly pear of a read.” —Skakespeare & Co Booksellers blog

“After Claude is a very funny book saved from off-putting vulgarity by an exhilarating talent and intelligence…” —Leonard Michaels, The New York Times Book Review

“Miss Owens has created a new kind of monster for your compassion. And isn’t that, after all, one of the classical functions of contemporary fiction?” —Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

“Novels like Fear of Flying and After Claude created a fresh voice that made us want to laugh out loud, pass the book around, read funny bits to our friends.”  —Morris Dickstein, The New York Times

“Harriet tells her story like a female Lenny Bruce…while I was reading…I was laughing too hard to see the page.” —John Lahr, Women’s Wear Daily