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Living Dolls and Other Women

Living Dolls and Other Women

By S. Montana Katz

In our era of #MeToo and fresh attempts to break the gender biased holds on our culture, a portrait of gender bias in the art world offers a microcosm of the pervasive challenges to achieving equality. Living Dolls and Other Women provides a fictionalized account of that world set against the pervasive sexual harassment in every corner of urban daily life. Set in the late 1980s, with New York City in the middle of a real estate crash, Living Dolls and Other Women chronicles the lives of five urban women as well as an activist organization comprised of women in the art world, the Living Dolls. Living Dolls and Other Women is an urban drama, chock full of action: crime, mystery, culture, and romance. The book takes on the contemporary issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, artistic merit, feminism, family values, and sexual preference. It delves into the main characters’ lives and traces dramatic and personal transformations of each. The comical yet dead serious antics of the Living Dolls thread through the novel as the backbone of the book

Details

Guernica World Editions (World Prose)

9781771835572

304 pages |

$18.00 USD
$18.00 USD
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Reviews

Living Dolls and Other Women is a wonderful read. I was intrigued from the first opening pages—which suggest that a violent and threatening presence is amongst the characters—and remained engrossed until the end. Montana Katz does a great job of creating a murder mystery that also reminds us of the threats and violence faced by women. These women’s lives are connected by a string of gruesome crimes in the NYC arts scene toward the end of the 20th century—crimes that may or may not be linked to a vigilante group calling themselves the “Living Dolls".

Anne O’Dwyer, Associate Professor of Psychology, Bard College of Simon’s Rock

Montana Katz is a treasure. She can write, imagine and fictionalize the issues we know so well better than anyone. Living Dolls are finely drawn characters trying to thrive in a world held hostage to harassment every which way they turn in the good old–bad old days when Soho was the Paris of the 80’s.

Oralee Wachter, New York Times bestselling author of No More Secrets For Me

The girls of The Living Dolls fight for women’s rights and realities amidst it all. Here, in these streets, there are women, at odds with each other’s views, defining their own stakes in the world they inhabit, defining in each turn: femininity, social mobility, power, life. That is the thread that drew me through each page of Living Dolls and Other Women, a persistent, powerful, messy, wonderful view of women in 1980s New York, searching for what it means to be truly themselves.

The Masters Review

But Living Dolls is not a traditional murder mystery. Rather, it is a portrait of a time and place in transition — as New York City is always in transition — and of the women who live there, struggling for rights, fair treatment, and their very identities.

Necessary Fiction

S. Montana Katz’ Living Dolls and Other Women is a wondrously unique novel whose characters and plot events emphasize the bias, harassment, and discrimination faced by woman of all ages, in all stages and circles of life, throughout human history.

Reader Views

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Awards

International Book Award for General Fiction (Short-listed)

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About the author

Montana Katz is a psychoanalyst. She has written two novels, a play, books on psychoanalysis, and two award-winning books on gender bias. Her writing is situated at the confluence of fact, history and the unconscious.