Search
      Tap cover to enlarge

      A Woman Named Drown

      by Padgett Powell
      Published
      May 1987
      Main Genre
      General Fiction General Fiction
      Rating
      Pages
      152
      Buy on Amazon Book

      About This Book

      Hailed by Time as an "extravagantly comic" novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America's South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress–cum-pool shark

      On the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a "woman named Drown." He moves in with her and just as quickly begins encountering her strange compatriots. Before he knows it, they're heading farther south together—to Florida—where the data that the dropout scientist is collecting from life's laboratory is about to get quite contradictory.

      Richly influenced by offbeat literary giant Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powell's A Woman Named Drown offers readers a smorgasbord of literary strangeness—a surreal series of adventures in which nothing much—and yet everything—happens at once.  

      Genres & Themes

      Genres

      General Fiction

      Subgenres

      Literary

      Buy This Book

      Amazon Paperback / Kindle Barnes & Noble Paperback / Nook Apple Books eBook Kobo eBook Audible Audiobook

      Formats & Editions

      Browse the different covers, formats, and publication history for this title.

      Paperback

      Paperback edition cover
      Paperback
      Jun 1988 Henry Holt ISBN 0805007504
      Buy
      Paperback edition cover
      Trade Paperback
      Jan 2014 Open Road Publishing ISBN 148046421X
      Buy

      Hardcover

      Hardcover edition cover
      Hardcover
      First Edition May 1987 Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0374292043
      Buy

      eBook

      eBook edition cover
      eBook
      Sep 2013 Open Road Publishing ISBN 1480441627
      Buy
      eBook edition cover
      eBook
      Sep 2013 Open Road Publishing ISBN B00EOIB3WS
      Buy
      eBook edition cover
      eBook
      Sep 2013 Open Road Publishing ISBN 1480441740
      Buy

      Audio

      Audio edition cover
      Audible
      Oct 2013 Audible Studios ISBN B00FQUC7YG
      Buy