“Reading Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie is like spending a rainy afternoon in a smaller, older movie theater watching a charming French movie with a woman (or a man) you’ve just met on the street and already like far too much. It’s sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil.” — Frederick Barthelme “Dermansky excels at depicting extreme emotional states and how we rationalize them.” — Village Voice From the critically-acclaimed author of Twins , Marcy Dermansky, comes a highly original novel of Manhattan, Paris, and Mexico; of love and motherhood; and of life on the lam. Fans of Heather O’Neill ( Lullabies for Little Criminals ) and A.M. Homes ( Music for Torching ) will revel in the wicked delights of Bad Marie . Dermansky follows her bold debut, Twins (2005), with a wickedly nihilistic and suspenseful tale of erotic mayhem. Impulsive, larcenous, and utterly self-absorbed, not to mention vampishly beautiful, Marie rather liked prison, where she could read her favorite book, a novel by a French author named Benoît Doniel, over and over. Her handsome young Mexican lover and inept accomplice hung himself in jail, and her mother won't even pick her up, so upon her release, Marie heads for her old friend Ellen's swanky New York apartment. Smug Ellen knows how dangerous Marie is, yet she desperately needs a nanny for her precocious toddler daughter, Caitlin. As for her husband, it's none other than Benoît Doniel. Bewitching and commanding, Dermansky creates a template for either a comedy of sexual errors or an all-out tragedy, then keeps readers guessing until the very end. Set in New York, Paris, the Riviera, and Mexico, this is an edgy, speedy, stylish, unpredictable, funny, and heart-stopping tale of a damaged soul who finally finds love in the clear-eyed intelligence, trust, and joy of a child. --Donna Seaman “Marcy Dermansky’s BAD MARIE is so very very bad that I enjoyed every word. A tour de force in mounting suspense as its witless narrator and the baby she’s stolen careen from one all-too-probable disaster to the next. Delicious.” - Terese Svoboda, author of Cannibal and Pirate Talk or Mermelade “Marcy Dermansky is one of the most demanding novelists of our generation―she leaves her readers little time for friends, food, or sleep. BAD MARIE is impossible to turn away from. It is as empathic as it is disturbing, as delicate as it is savage. Sly, honest, and extraordinary, this gem of a book should come with a warning: you’ll have to remind yourself to breathe.” - Tish Cohen, author of The Truth About Delilah Blue “BAD MARIE is impossible to turn away from. It is as empathic as it is disturbing, as delicate as it is savage. Sly, honest, and extraordinary, this gem of a book should come with a warning: you’ll have to remind yourself to breathe.” - Tish Cohen, author of The Truth About Delilah Blue “Reading Marcy Dermansky’s BAD MARIE is like spending a rainy afternoon in a smaller, older movie theater watching a charming French movie with a woman (or a man) you’ve just met on the street and already like far too much. It’s sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil.” - Frederick Barthelme “[BAD MARIE is] sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil.” - Frederick Barthelme “Marcy Dermansky makes it easy to love Marie, a husband-stealing, baby-snatching, underachieving ex-con. The author sends us rocketing along on a brilliant, bumpy ride across the ever-changing landscape formed by the simple loves, the staggering losses and the bad choices that are Marie’s life. Fast-paced and unsentimental, Bad Marie blazes with life.” - Barb Johnson, author of More of This World or Maybe Another “Brainy, emotionally sophisticated.” - New York Times Book Review “Marie, the protagonist of Marcy Dermansky’s witty, disturbing new novel, is almost completely unlikable, and yet stands out as one of the more interesting characters in recent fiction....Before you know it, the book becomes a skillfully paced page-turner...weirdly hilarious...nothing if not captivating.” - Creative Loafing “Not enough women write novels like this one. Dermansky is funny and fearless. I like Marie so much because she seems to care so little whether I like her or not. That’s a working definition of badass. Bad Marie is one.” - Esquire “A wickedly nihilistic and suspenseful tale of erotic mayhem . . . .[E]dgy, speedy, stylish, unpredictable, funny, and heart-stopping.” - Booklist “Marcy Dermansky’s slim picaresque follows the misadventures of a nanny who absconds to Paris with her charge and the toddler’s dashing father. Marie is the amoral engineer of multiple train wrecks, but in Dermansky’s hands she’s somehow irresistible.” - Time magazine “[Marie is] an antiheroine for our time . . . A page-turning melodrama told with chilled cosmopolitan irony, the moral puzzles at the heart of BAD MARIE linger after the delicious meringue of the book has b