"This book has a special place in my soft queer heart, and I've had a hard time trying to explain to people why it's so magical and deeply familiar. These vignettes are quiet, comfortable, and radically intimate."
Publisher NYRB Classics
Publication Date 2011-03-15
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781590173787
A New York Review Books Original Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation Two women, both artists, no longer young, live and work on opposite sides of a large apartment building, their studios connected by an attic passageway. They have loved and argued for decades, long enough to anticipate the other's next words and to guess her next move. Yet no matter how many times they've played the game, it is always capable of surprising them. Tove Jansson tells the women's story in a series of brief, spare episodes, which bear the fitness of parable and the nuance of portraiture. We see the two as they watch Fassbinder films and B Westerns, critique each other's works in progress, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson's The Summer Book), and travel through the American Southwest. The type of love story that is rarely told, Fair Play is a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.