The Big Moose Prize Winner

$9.95

ISBN: 978-1-62557-921-8

The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg

Publication Date: September 2014

Description

Hard copies of this title are no longer available for purchase through Black Lawrence Press, but it is available from most online book retailers. Better yet, your local bookstore should be able to order a copy for you.

Wholesale customers, please purchase this title through Ingram.

E-books are still available for purchase.


Cousin to Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces) and Homer Simpson, Zelda McFigg believes she could have been somebody, if only someone had recognized her inner beauty and star quality. She runs away from home at age 14, and at age 49 ¼ writes this furiously funny memoir to “set the record straight.”

Praise

“Ingenious comic author Betsy Robinson, in finely wrought prose, tells the life story of Zelda McFigg. Zelda is a heavyweight, seemingly guided or misguided by a ruinous wrath and the feeling that dishonesty is the best policy. Robinson designs a remarkable pilgrimage for Zelda and uncovers under her many, many layers, a sorrowful affectionate heart.”

-Susan Trott

Zelda is an iconic voice of our media-struck age, ferociously trying to rectify the gross injustice of her non-celebrity. A character angry, proud, and desperate to be seen.”

-John Sayles

A thoroughly delightful new novel-in parts funny, tragic, angry, heartbreaking, caustic, absurd and totally all-too true. A comic geshrei from the heart, and pleasure from first page to last!”

-Steve Kaplan

I couldn’t put it down…I was amazed at the originality…I enjoyed how Zelda made it through the world. She is a person I’ve never, in my wildest imagination, ever known before.”

-Jonathan Storm

In the deft, witty, highly conscious hands of novelist (and theatre veteran) Betsy Robinson, the excruciatingly wild ride of The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg becomes an act of seduction. (And Zelda thought she was writing a memoir!) Never staying in one place too long, which is more than can be said of its anti-heroine, Zelda, the novel’s tone is as reliably unreliable as all of its scarred characters. If there is really nothing to hang on to, it must be a little like life, or death, or trying to create something. Betsy Robinson is alive, and kicking.”

-Estha Weiner

About the Author

© photo by Melodie Somers

Betsy Robinson

Betsy Robinson is a fiction writer, journalist, playwright, and freelance book editor for indie publishers and individual writers. For almost seven years she was managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine until the economy imploded and she was downsized out of the job. What followed was a year and a half working on her third novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg. Her first novel, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, was published by Mid-List Press in 2001 as winner of their First Series Award for the Novel. Her play scripts have been produced at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Theatre in the Works (Amherst, MA), in Los Angeles, Off-off Broadway, on cable TV, and in Iowa where she won first prize in the Dubuque Fine Arts 1-Act Contest. In 1987, with her mother/writing partner Edna Robinson, she was awarded a Writers Guild East Foundation Fellowship to write unproduced movies. A Bennington College and National Theater Institute graduate, Betsy is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre where she’s had many workshop productions and first performed her one-woman one-act Darleen Dances.

Visit Author Page