The Princess of 72nd Street

Reviews

“If one were to imagine a perfect specimen of a ‘forgotten classic’ by a woman writer from the 1960s and ’70s, you might come up with The Princess of 72nd Street. Like Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed or Iris Owens’s After Claude, it’s a slender, accomplished and frequently funny work told from the perspective of a lively and bruised female consciousness. . . . Its first-person narration feels essayistic, full of bold declarations about heterosexual love, gender roles and aesthetics.”—The Washington Post

“Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street lyrically details the seventh ‘radiance’ experienced by a young figure painter named Ellen who, during fits of seeming psychosis, believes herself to be the sovereign ruler of West 72nd between Broadway and Central Park. Ellen/Princess Esmerelda makes witty observations about creativity, femininity, and public life with a voice that feels startlingly modern.”—NYLON

“It’s hard for me to believe I only just read this book for the first time this winter. And I’m happy for everyone else that it’s getting reissued this year. I love the way Kraf writes, she jams so much into her sentences.”—Sophie Kemp, Document

“A raggedy genius is finally queened, bringing a fairy-tale ending to this cracked, dark story of the old West Side.”—Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

“When a novelist tells a good story well, it becomes a good novel. When a novelist uses words as if they were sacred love, what is written becomes poetry. Elaine Kraf is a poet.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A frenetic and glittering manifesto, wherein a woman wrestles—or dances—with the most misunderstood parts of herself . . . a well-deserved reintroduction of what is bound to be a beloved classic for contemporary young women.”—Olivia Gatwood, author of Whoever You Are, Honey

“Kraf writes . . . about the habits of madness without trivializing the grimness and pain.”—The Village Voice

“For a novel that is in many ways about fantasy, there is a bracing wind of keen discernment that sweeps through, from the first pages to the last. It is one of the marvels of this book that Elaine Kraf manages to be so recklessly fantastical and so coolly perceptive at the same time.”—Jen Silverman, author of There’s Going to Be Trouble

“There are astonishingly affecting contrasts of the sordid and sad, the detached and misaligned. The Princess of 72nd Street is a serious, important piece of contemporary fiction.”—Booklist

“An electric portrait of one woman’s blazing unraveling. Kraf is one of literature’s hidden gems—that rare writer who refuses to let us look away from her bright, transcendent suffering. Her work demands a place on your bookshelf right next to Plath and Ditlevsen.”—Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe Expand reviews