Famepunk: Part 2: Middlemarch

The story of a fictional Brooklyn-born girl tennis prodigy, FAMEPUNK is a multi-volume work about love and competition, lesbians and the closet, children and parents, nature and art, the Cold War and its aftermath, money, globalism, technology, women's bodies in the marketplace, secrecy, hypocrisy, perversion, addiction, truth-telling--and tennis. This is a fan's novel, grounded in my love for the sport and its real-life players.

Set in 1988, Middlemarch reunites the charismatic international cast of US Open 1987 for a follow-up year of historic action at the highest levels of the women’s game. As Brooklyn-born heroine Emma Jasohn, the Grand Slams’ newest superstar, trades in the shopping malls of Long Island for the clay courts of the American South, she finds herself on a losing streak with empty pockets, battling ghosts, curses, Gold Coast retirees, Yugoslavian goblin children, crazed evangelical pastors, witches and soft-core pornographers, bigots and brand names, bad pie and weed shortages, law enforcement, propriety and poisonous wildlife. But her backers at the Moscow Talent School face the biggest complication yet, when Emma’s unexpected friendship with German teen head case and Wimbledon champion Vivienne Helm takes a dangerous plunge into passionate romance. Through it all, the irrepressible former unknown remains determined to defend her US Open title—and to finish reading George Eliot’s masterpiece…soon.

It’s very long.