The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter (Hardcover)

Author: Rosmarie Waldrop

Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project (2019)

“Josef and Frederika Seifert made a bad marriage—he so metaphysical, she, furious frustrated singer, furious frustrated femme fatale, unfaithful within two months of the wedding day. The setting is small town Germany between the wars; the Seiferts are just those ‘ordinary people’ who helped Hitler rise, bequeathing their daughter, who tells their story, a legacy of grief and guilt. Rosmarie Waldrop’s haunting novel, superbly intelligent, evocative and strange, reverberates in the memory for a long time, a song for the dead, a judgment.” 

–Angela Carter

“Broken into sections with titles like ‘Portrait of Frederika as a Control Tower,’ Waldrop’s examination of a private domestic war inside a world war might be considered in relation to Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly, the celebration of an erotic love life inside the same world war.” 

–Forrest Gander

“Honestly, the novel is a joy to read, the kind of reading where you’re almost smiling? I really think there’s nothing like it. In this reissue, Dorothy—in the book’s 5.5 x 7 in. shape, clean white cover with a Rudolf Bonvie series of repeating, slightly changing photographs of hands reaching across a divide, like Lucy’s looping narrative, a layered history of human interaction—brings the pleasure of Waldrop’s physical prose to the book form itself, making a lovely, lovely object.” 

–Kelly Krumrie