JD

Jonathan Ascher, a radical writer and cultural hero in the 1960s, has been dead for thirty years. When a would-be biographer approaches his widow, Martha, she delves for the first time into her husband’s papers. She finds journals that begin as a wisecracking chronicle of life at the fringes of the New York literary scene, Jonathan’s adventures in the sexual underground, and the social upheavals that led to his famous bookJD. As Martha reads on, she finds herself in a long-distance conversation with her dead husband, fighting with him again about their rocky life together and learning about the unseen tragic drama in her own apartment that ended with the destruction of their son, Mickey. Learning about herself, finally, through her confrontation with a man who will not let her go, even in death.JD is a brilliant and harrowing view of a half century of the American experiment, acted out on a small stage by three people who cannot find a wayneither sex nor touch nor wordsto speak their love for one another.

Mark Merlis is the author of the novels American Studies, An Arrow’s Flight, andMan About Town. His work has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Ferro-Grumley Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He lives in Philadelphia with his husband. For more information, visit www.markmerlis.com.