Dear Miss Metropolitan

A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

Introducing an extraordinary and original writer in Carolyn Ferrell whose first novel Dear Miss Metropolitan explores the intersections of grief and rage, personal strength and healing--and what we owe one another.

Fern seeks refuge from her mother’s pill-popping and boyfriends via Soul Train; Gwin finds salvation in the music of Prince much to her congregation’s dismay and Jesenia, miles ahead of her classmates at her gifted and talented high school, is a brainy and precocious enigma. None of this matters to Boss Man, the monster who abducts them and holds them captive in a dilapidated house in Queens.

On the night they are finally rescued, throngs line the block gawking and claiming ignorance. Among them is lifetime resident Miss Metropolitan, advice columnist for the local weekly, but how could anyone who fancies herself a ＂newspaperwoman＂ have missed a horror story unfolding right across the street? And why is it that only two of the three girls--now women--were found? The mystery haunts the two remaining ＂victim girls＂ who are subjected to the further trauma of becoming symbols as they continuously adapt to their present and their unrelenting past.

Like Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan gives voice to characters surviving unimaginable tragedy. The story is inventively revealed before, during, and after the ordeal in this singular and urgent novel.

Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the short-story collection, Don’t Erase Me, which was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the John C. Zachiris Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. She has also received grants from the Fulbright Association, German Academic Exchange (D.A.A.D.), City University of New York MAGNET Program, and National Endowment for the Arts. Ferrell’s stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2018 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century, among other places. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children.