SEATING ARRANGEMENTS: A PREVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

GIVEAWAY ENDED
SEATING ARRANGEMENTS

BY MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements is a stunning debut, an irresistible social satire that is also an unforgettable meditation on the persistence of hope, the yearning for connection, and the promise of enduring love.

Winn Van Meter is heading for his family’s retreat on the pristine New England island of Waskeke. Normally a haven of calm, for the next three days this sanctuary will be overrun by tipsy revelers as Winn prepares for the marriage of his daughter Daphne to the affable young scion Greyson Duff.  Winn’s wife, Biddy, has planned the wedding with military precision, but arrangements are sideswept by a storm of salacious misbehavior and intractable lust: Daphne’s sister, Livia, who has recently had her heart broken by Teddy Fenn, the son of her father’s oldest rival, is an eager target for the seductive wiles of Greyson’s best man; Winn, instead of reveling in his patriarchal duties, is tormented by his long-standing crush on Daphne’s beguiling bridesmaid Agatha; and the bride and groom find themselves presiding over a spectacle of misplaced desire, marital infidelity, and monumental loss of faith in the rituals of American life.

Hilarious, keenly intelligent, and commandingly well written, Shipstead’s deceptively frothy first novel is a piercing rumination on desire, on love and its obligations, and on the dangers of leading an inauthentic life, heralding the debut of an exciting new literary voice.  

AN EXCERPT FROM SEATING ARRANGEMENTS:

One • The Castle of the Maidens

By Sunday the wedding would be over, and for that Winn Van Meter was grateful. It was Thursday. He woke early, alone in his Connecticut house, a few late stars still burning above the treetops. His wife and two daughters were already on Waskeke, in the island house, and as he came swimming up out of sleep, he thought of them in their beds there: Biddy keeping to her side, his daughters’ hair fanned over their pillows. But first he thought of a different girl (or barely thought of her—­she was a bubble bursting on the surface of a dream) who was also asleep on Waskeke. She would be in one of the brass guest beds up on the third floor, under the eaves; she was one of his daughter’s bridesmaids.

Most mornings, Winn’s entries into the waking world were prompt, his torso canting up from the sheets like the mast of a righted sailboat, but on this day he turned off his alarm clock before it could ring and stretched his limbs out to the bed’s four corners. The room was silent, purple, and dim. By nature, he disapproved of lying around. Lost time could not be regained nor missed mornings stored up for later use. Each day was a platform for accomplishment. Up with the sun, he had told his daughters when they were children, whipping off their covers with a flourish and exposing them lying curled like shrimp on their mattresses. Now Daphne was a bride (a pregnant bride, no point in pretending otherwise) and Livia, her younger sister, the maid of honor. The girls and their mother were spending the whole week on the island with an ever-­multiplying bunch of bridesmaids and relatives and future in-­laws, but he had decided he could not manage so much time away from work. Which was true enough. A whole week on the matrimonial front lines would be intolerable, and furthermore, he had no wish to confirm that the bank would rumble on without him, his absence scarcely noticed except by the pin-­striped young sharks who had begun circling his desk with growing determination.

To finish reading this review, visit the Random House Publishing Website HERE. 

PRAISE FOR SEATING ARRANGEMENTS:

“Maggie Shipstead is an outrageously gifted writer, and her assured first novel, Seating Arrangements, is by turns hilarious and deeply moving.”

—Richard Russo, author of That Old Cape Magic

“Seating Arrangements is bursting with perfectly observed characters and unforgettable scenes. This gorgeous, wise, funny, sprawling novel about family, fidelity, and social class, is the best book I've read in ages.”

—Courtney Sullivan, author of Maine

“A pitch-perfect debut from a master storyteller, Seating Arrangements is a rich and deep work: a smart, consuming novel that manages also to be delightfully funny. A romp of a book, with whales and weddings and wealth, it is, at its heart, a warning against the empty seductions of status and exclusivity.”

—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

“Smart and frothy…Beneath the surface of this summery romp lie animosities, well-paced sexual suspense and a clash between appearances and authenticity…waltzlike.”

—New York Times Book Review

"A sophisticated summer romp...Shipstead's weave of wit and observation continually delights. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday she trades her Lilly Pulitzer for something from Joseph Pulitzer."

—Washington Post

"Whipsmart and engaging...the best kind of smart beach read."

—O Magazine

“Dead-on delightful…a champagne-fueled, saltwater-scented comedy of upper-crust New England manners and mores.”

—National Geographic Traveler

"Irresistible [and] joyously good."

—Daily Mail (UK)

“Elegant, delightful…Shipstead’s sentences simmer and crackle on the page.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“This is one of those rare debut novels that neither forsakes plot for language nor language for plot. It is gratifying on every scale…The novel is teeming with the sort of casual philosophizing that encourages passage-underlining and earnest recommendation."

—The Boston Globe

“Funny and dark and poignant—sometimes all at once. Shisptead is a gifted storyteller whose richly realized characters and sweetly flowing prose coalesce into a tale that is by parts sweet and sharp, humorous and heartbreaking. It’s an auspicious debut by an undeniably talented writer.”

—The Maine Edge

“Zestful yet acerbic…for all its madcap quirkiness, Shipstead’s adroit escapade artfully delivers a poignant reflection on the enduring if frustrating nature of love, hope, and family."

—Booklist

“Vibrant prose and moments of keen insight.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Delightful…Shipstead writes with clarity and confidence, nimbly dropping into multiple characters’ heads, giving each a distinct voice and point of view but always with great wit and heart. Seating Arrangements brims with sharp observations about love, lust, family, and the real meaning of marital bliss.”

—Entertainment Weekly, A- review

“Impressive…Shipstead’s characters…feel totally true to life.”

—People, Style Watch

“Seating Arrangements delightfully and poignantly upends the WASP idyll, poking holes into the studiously shabby carpets to reveal the limitations of a privileged world that revolves around the same plummy prep-school pedigrees, club memberships and summer havens…through prose that sparkles while it slays.”

—USA Today 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Maggie Shipstead was born in 1983 and grew up in Orange County, California. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, VQR, Glimmer Train, The Best American Short Stories, and her story "La Moretta" was a 2012 National Magazine Award finalist. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. She doesn't really know where she lives but is open to suggestions. Her first novel, Seating Arrangements, was published by Knopf on June 12, 2012.

"INTERVIEW" WITH THE AUTHOR:

On your nightstand now:

Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Then Again by Diane Keaton, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee, The Man of Property by John Galsworthy and Arcadia by Lauren Groff. I like to have a smorgasbord going. My nightstand situation gets precarious.

Favorite books when you were a child:

The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley (Walter Farley was the answer to a pub trivia bonus question that recently won me a free drink, by the way), Madeleine L'Engle's novels, and The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois. Oh, and I can't--absolutely must not--leave out Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.

Your top five authors:

A random sampling from my top dozen: Jane Austen, John le Carré, John Updike and Jeffrey Eugenides. Apparently I like writers whose first names start with the letter J.

Favorite line from a book:

This isn't a particularly unique choice, but the last line of "The Dead" in Dubliners by James Joyce: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

I love the sensation of being punched in the gut by a closing line, and that one is a classic knockout. It has movement, musicality, surprise, sadness and beauty. Perfection.

Books you most want to be real:

Um, I would like to attend Hogwarts, please. I genuinely and whole-heartedly love the Harry Potter books (by J.K. Rowling, for any recently arrived Martians). Not only have I read all the hardbacks more than once, but when I was in grad school and drove between Iowa and California 10 times in two years (that's a total of 18,000 miles--I have a dog who needs to be included in all family holidays), the audiobooks absolutely sustained me. My air conditioning failed when I was driving across Nevada on a 105-degree summer afternoon and, faced with the choice of rolling down the windows and getting some breeze or being able to hear my Harry Potter, I chose to swelter and keep listening.

.....Excerpt taken from "Book Brahmin: Maggie Shipstead" from SHELF AWARENESS, June 29, 2012

MY THOUGHTS/REVIEW:
Maggie Sheapstead’s SEATING ARRANGEMENT is not the summer fluff about a wedding that I had expected. Instead, it is more of a characters study about characters that are well written but not easy to like.  The setting is not surprising as it takes place on an island much like Martha’s Vineyard and happened during the three days of wedding festivities for one of the main characters, the bride-to-be, Daphne. Daphne should be happily celebrating this time, but is instead a bit more apprehensive about a problem she has.

There are actually two protagonists. First is that of the father of the bride, Winn Van Meter, who is a banker with no idea the country is going through economic hard times. He and his wife, Biddy (yes, I said Biddy) only are interested in who is going to be attending the wedding and that it goes off well. Winn is an incredibly heartless and selfish man. His actions are hard to believe but it doesn’t keep you from continuing to read about him. The other main character is surprisingly not the bride, Daphne, but rather her younger sister, Livia. Livia got pregnant while away at school and that really annoyed her dear old understanding Dad. Why?.. Because after one too many, she proclaimed for everyone at the Harvard Club to hear, that she was pregnant! Winn was a member there forever and how embarrassing for him was that? How the weekend and wedding go, is the big question as you read on. However, along with that is the question of what will Winn do next to shock, surprise, and disgust the reader. (See? I REALLY didn’t like this person which tells one how well written he was!)

I found Shipstead’s narrative flowed smoothly and her characters were well developed and followed through nicely. Even though Winn is so exasperating, there is such dark humor and sharp, edgy writing that the book works. I will be anxious to see what the author comes up with next as I felt this was a strong debut for a first novel. It begs for lots of discussion so I can see it as a good book club pick.   

GIVEAWAY

THANKS TO CATHERINE AT KNOPF AND 

RANDOM HOUSE, I HAVE ONE COPY OF

THIS DELIGHTFUL DEBUT NOVEL FROM

MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD TO GIVE AWAY

 

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