Books by Kate Braverman

The author of The Incantation of Frida K. traces her coming-of-age in Los Angeles in the 1950s, anti-war activities during her education at Berkeley, experiences with single motherhood within the east L.A. barrio, struggles with alcohol, and relocation after her marriage to New York's Allegheny Mountains.

On her deathbed at age forty-six, artist Frida Kahlo recounts through memory and hallucination her life experiences, including her interactions with fellow artist Diego Rivera, who she loves despite her open scorn of his creations.

Probes the strained relationships between a woman and her abrasive mother, her cancer-stricken father, an ex-husband who is permanently tuned into Star Trek, and Jason, her erotic but higly manipulative lover. Reprint.

The indigo skies and lush vegetation of the contemporary West Coast belie the damaged souls and desperate alienation that lurk behind fading stucco walls and off the endless highways. The lives of women on the edge and beyond the margins have seldom been explored with as much power or insight as in these brilliant stories by award-winning novelist and poet Kate Braverman. In a world without succor, Braverman's characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. "Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows" must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The protagonist of "Pagan Night" waits with her unnamed and unwanted infant in a-shabby zoo in Idaho while her partner buys dope and makes plans to reconstitute their failed rock band. And the precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has enjoyed so avidly. Abandonment, in these wrenching stories, comes in many forms, and freedom is elusive and sometimes fraught with pain and terror.

Newly arrived at her brother's home in 1960s L.A., teenager Jordan Lerner struggles to deal with her brother's terminal illness, her mother's dalliances with a string of men, and a school where she is considered an outcast.