After Claude
  • Published: 15 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781590173633
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 232
  • RRP: $35.00

After Claude

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Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it’s Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. To the contrary, she will stay and exact revenge—or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it’s easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives and hearts—until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.
  • Published: 15 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781590173633
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 232
  • RRP: $35.00
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About the author

Iris Owens

Iris Owens moved from Greenwich Village to Paris at the age of twenty after her first marriage failed. She wrote numerous wildly popular and regularly banned erotic novels for the Traveller’s Companion series of Olympia Press under the pseudonym Harriet Daimler. Under her own name, she published After Claude and Hope Diamond Refuses. She died in 2008.

Praise for After Claude

  • "The authenticity of [the protagonist] Harriet's character...strikes the reader as at least partially autobiographical. But 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. It is not so much what happens in After Claude as the way it 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
  • "After Claude is a very funny book saved from off-putting vulgarity by an exhilarating talent and intelligence. It is written with high-quality logical English, flexible enough to mimic the idiom of idiots, even to relax into triteness, without bringing the author's power of mind or feeling in doubt... I haven't read a more wittily offensive serious novel recently..." --Leonard Michaels, The New York Times Book Review
  • "Novels like...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
  • "On every page wisecracks explode like anti-personnel mines." --Newsweek
  • "A very funny book by an exhilarating talent." --The New York Times
  • "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
  • "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

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