Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Generous-hearted and wickedly insightful, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing is the New York Times bestselling novel by Melissa Bank and part of the Penguin Essentials, a series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, relationships, and the treacherous waters of the workplace. Soon Jane is swept off her feet by an older man and into a Fitzgeraldesque whirl of cocktail parties, country houses, and rules that were made to be broken, but comes to realise that it's a world where the stakes are much too high for comfort. With an unforgettable comic touch, Bank skilfully teases out universal issues, puts a clever new spin on the mating dance, and captures in perfect pitch what it's like to come of age as a young woman.'This chronicle of a New Yorker's relationships has a wit and perceptiveness that singles it out from the crowd' Guardian'As hilarious as Girls' Guide is, there's a wise, serious core here' Wall Street Journal'A sexy, pour-your-heart-out, champagne tingle of a read-thoughtful, wise, and tell-all honest. Bank's is a voice that you'll remember' Cosmopolitan

Beautifully written and very funny. . . as with Salinger and Carver, there is crystalline simplicity to Bank's prose, I read the first chapter and thought, 'Wait, I know this girl' . . . I realized she was my friend . . . she made me laugh, she made me weep, and when I closed the book at the end of the day, I knew I'd never forget her, Charming and funny, A smart, ruefully funny chronicle of a modern young woman's search for love . . . a model of well-crafted narrative building to a thoughtful, hopeful conclusion. Bank has created a delightful heroine who deserves her happy ending-even though any reader who has really been paying attention to the sharp, unsentimental details knows that all happy endings are provisional, One marvels at Bank's assured control of her material, her witty, distinctive voice and her ability to find comedy, pathos and drama in ordinary lives . . . phenomenally good

Melissa Bank is the author of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot. She won the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction, and holds an MFA from Cornell University. Her work has appeared in Allure, Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Guardian, North American Review, O: the Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Washington Post, Zoetrope and many others. Her books have been translated into 33 languages. She divides her time between New York City and East Hampton.