Vladimir

Chapter I I.
Although I had seen and heard Vladimir speak during the master class, the candidates luncheon, and the faculty retreat, I had not had the chance to say more than a few words directly to him until the fall semester. When I first met him, in the spring after he'd been hired as a full-time junior professor, I was coming late to and leaving early from all full-faculty events to avoid having to talk with any of my colleagues. Even sitting three chairs away from Florence was almost too much for me to bear-lightning bolts of anger shot from my vagina to my extremities. I've always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.

On an early September evening, the first week of the semester, he visited me at my home, and that is when we had our first real conversation. I was enjoying the cool breeze in the sitting room of our town house, drinking mineral water-my rule is that if I am alone I do not drink alcohol until 9 p.m. (a practical tactic to keep my weight down)-and reading a history of witches in America, when he rang the bell. Since the allegations had been brought against my husband, I felt unable to read fiction. Usually I eagerly set about a reading project each summer to find at least one or two new short stories or novel excerpts to read with my classes. It was important for them and me to always keep acquainted with the contemporary voice. This summer, however, my eyes felt as though they could not focus on the words. The invented worlds, all the made-up-ness and stolen-ness of fiction, all the characters-they felt like a meager and pitiful offering. I needed dates, facts, numbers, and statistics. Weapons. This is our world and this is what happened in it. In the first class of my survey courses I was accustomed to reading a section of Poetics aloud. In it Aristotle discusses the difference between history and poetry and why poetry, being crafted and theoretical, is a superior representation of

Julia May Jonas is a writer and theater director. She has taught theater at Skidmore College and New York University, and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Vladimir is her debut novel.

"Delightful...a witty dance with the ghost of Nabokov and a razor-edged commentary on academia at our current fraught moment...by turns, cathartic, devious and terrifically entertaining." -Jean Hanff Korelitz, The New York Times

"A virtuoso debut...our unnamed narrator [is] so witty, sharp and seductive that, as a reader, I was pretty much putty in her hands." -Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

"Vladimir goes into such outrageous territory that my jaw literally dropped at moments while I was reading it. There's a rare blend here of depth of character, mesmerizing prose, and fast-paced action." -Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

"Jonas, with a potent, pumping voice, has drawn a character so powerfully candid that when she does things that are malicious, dangerous and, yes, predatory, we only want her to do them again." -Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times

"A deliciously dark fable of sex and power... Earmark an entire afternoon to devour this propulsive story of obsession, scandal, and transgressive desire." -Esquire

If Netflix's The Chair, Lisa Taddeo's best-seller Three Women, and the most compelling passages of Ottessa Moshfegh's Death in Her Hands had a love child (just go with me here), it would be this fiction debut. With a title character who's a sought-after young novelist new to a college faculty, Vladimir leaves the reader with more questions than answers-about sex, and sexual politics-in the most delicious way. -Entertainment Weekly

"Jonas's narrator is a work of art in herself." -The Washington Post

"Timely, whip-smart, and darkly funny." -People (Book of the Week)

"[Vladimir] soldiers into charged territory... with an unreliable and at times almost defiantly unlikable narrator at the helm. This woman is no joke. She's ravenous-for rich and indulgent meals, big sloshing glasses of wine and sneaked cigarettes... In taking this older woman's desire