The Mineral Palace

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [x], 326. Quarter-bound forest green cloth over lime-green paper boards, lettered in green foil to spine; purple endpapers. Photographic frontispiece. Jacket design by Honi Werner.

Author's debut novel. Finalist for the inaugural 2001 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of 2000. In the drought-ridden spring of 1934, Bena Jonssen, a mid-western doctor's wife, moves to Pueblo, a Western plains town plagued by suffocating dust storms and equally suffocating social strictures, where her life begins to unravel on the seamier edge of town.

An associate professor of creative writing at Columbia University and a founding editor of The Believer magazine, Julavits has been published in Esquire, Culture+Travel, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney's Quarterly. Her novels include The Effect of Living Backwards (2003), The Uses of Enchantment (2006), and The Vanishers (2012).

"Julavits can be a magician with language, spinning brilliant metaphors and investing descriptive scenes with almost palpable dimensionality." –Publishers Weekly