It’s a journey Out West with the book jerks–we’re reading Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947)! One of the many under-appreciated women’s novels of the midcentury, this account of Molly and Ralph Fawcett and their bonneted, foofy, bunny rabbit sisters Rachel and Leah moves us into a conversation about childhood, gender, and geography in the US. We also discuss Stafford’s hilariously punchy introduction, in which she apologizes for the book’s ending, as well as embodiment and publication genealogy.

We read the reprinted (and beautiful) NYRB version from 2010. We recommend a recent article by Katie Collins in the Journal of Modern Literature called “‘Her Ruined Head’: Defacement and Disability in Jean Stafford's Life and Fiction.”

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