Simon & Schuster issues
new paperback edition of
The Madhouse Nudes
a novel by Robert Schultz
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
When the painter John Ordway moves from New York City to a small Iowa town and hires two local women as models, his work and life deepen and complicate in unforeseen ways, probing the question: What does it mean for a man to see a woman truly? Subtly conceived and artfully executed, The Madhouse Nudes is part love story, part mystery-a brave exploration of guilt and innocence.
John Ordway is an artist working in the tradition of the female nude. In New York City that preoccupation merely aroused the ire of feminist art critics, but now that he and his girlfriend, Jamie, a potter and weaver, have retreated to tiny Delphi, Iowa, he finds himself the object of a more pointed suspicion.
Then Jamie leaves him, and one of his local models is attacked. Surrounded by judgment and no longer able to view his work with detachment, he is forced to question the impulses that drive him to it. As events approach their crisis, he must answer questions of urgent personal importance: What is the fate of a body in the world? And what does it mean for a man to see a woman truly?
Art collides with life, painfully and revealingly, in this evocative first novel, which brings a poet's sensibility to the charged question of women's bodies and men's desires.
About the Author: Robert Schultz's books include two collections of poetry, Vein Along the Fault and Winter in Eden, as well as his novel, The Madhouse Nudes. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Award in fiction, Cornell University 's Corson Bishop Poetry Prize, and, from The Virginia Quarterly Review, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry. He has been a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize and the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. A native Iowan, he attended Luther College and pursued his graduate studies at Cornell University. In 1985 he returned to Luther, where he taught for 19 years. He has also taught at Cornell and at the University of Virginia. Since 2004 he has been the John P. Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.
The Madhouse Nudes was published in a cloth edition by Simon & Schuster in 1997, the film option was purchased by Wild Card Productions of San Francisco & New York, and on the basis of the novel Robert Schultz received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. Loess Hills Books issued the first trade paperback edition October 2006. The current Simon & Schuster edition became available February 2008.The Madhouse Nudes is of special interest on the following topics:
• Painters and artists
• Painters and their models
• The female nude
• "The male gaze"
• Images of women in American art
• A Sense of Place: NYC, Iowa, Midwest
• The Gulf War
• Epistolary novels
• Crime, Mystery