2001 Graywolf Press trade PB, stated1st printing, full number line. A mother's obsessional love is shown as rationally insane, making her behavior all the more harrowing. Victoria Redel's novel won the S. Mariella Gable Prize.

"A luminous and richly layered novel evoking The Big Chill--the story of a group of lifetime friends who gather together to confront life, love, and now, mortality Before Everything is a celebration of friendship and love between a group of women who have known one another since they were girls. They've faced everything together, from youthful sprees and scrapes to mid-life turning points. Now, as Anna, the group's trailblazer and brightest spark, enters hospice, they gather to do what they've always done--talk and laugh and help each other make choices and plans, this time in Anna's rural Massachusetts home. Helen, Anna's best friend and a celebrated painter, is about to remarry. The others face their own challenges--Caroline with her sister's mental health crisis; Molly with a teenage daughter's rebellion; Ming with her law practice--dilemmas with kids and work and love. Before Everything is as funny as it is bittersweet, as the friends revel in the hilarious mistakes they've seen one another through, the secrets kept and adventures shared. But now all sense of time has shifted, and the pattern of their lives together takes on new meaning. The novel offers a brilliant, emotionally charged portrait, deftly conveying the sweep of time over everyday lives, and showing how even in difficult endings, gifts can unfold. Above all it is an ode to friendship, and to how one person shapes the journeys of those around her"--

In eleven original, surprising and deliciously dark stories, Victoria Redel moves effortlessly between men's and women's perspectives in stories that explore marriage, divorce and parenthood. A newly divorced mother stumbles her way back into single life. A young man and his girlfriend clean out his dead mother's overstuffed home. A woman struggles to hide her affair from a doting husband and inquisitive daughter. A man descends into a drug-fueled dream as he imagines losing his pregnant wife to a historical, nineteenth century figure. Redel indelibly captures the ways we love, the ways we yearn and the ways we sabotage each. Throughout the collection, children struggle to make sense of the adult world's uncertainties as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, find themselves pressed up against their own limits, "the exaltations and treasons of one's own mothy heart." Redel has again done what Grace Paley said of Redel's first collection, "Only a poet could have written this prose. Only a storyteller could keep a reader turning these pages so greedily."

"At eight years old, Gerta Pieters is forced to disguise herself as a boy and sent to work for a genteel Dutch family. When their brilliant and beautiful daughter Maria sees through Gerta's ruse, she insists that Gerta accompany her to Amsterdam and help her enter the elite, male-dominated art world. While Maria rises in the ranks of society as a painting prodigy, Gerta makes herself invaluable in every way: confidante, muse, lover. But as Gerta steps into her own talents, their relationship fractures into a complex web of obsession and rivalry--and the secrets they keep threaten to unravel everything"--

With a voice that is rooted in the lush, immediate present, Victoria Redel explores the necessity to live and love deeply in her third collection of poems, Woman Without Umbrella. With her fearless and insistent engagement with language, Redel leads us, unprotected and exposed to the elements, through landscapes urban and domestic, contemplative and erotic, as she navigates the self and the world, from love to disaster to "a calm easy everyday" and back to love again.

What does it mean to be a woman--a lover, mother and artist? In "Swoon, Redel tackles the question of Eros as it animates domestic life. These are poems unafraid to embrace the sweetness of difficulty and the difficult sweetness of intimacy. Using short and extended lyric, prose poem, circular narrative, Redel refuses formal categorization, demanding of poetry a complex and textured vision of the female experience. "Swoon is a robustly sexy, intelligent, daring book of poems.