It was the terrine that got to me. I felt queasy enough that I had to sit in the living room and narrate to my husband what was the brutal list of tasks that would result in a terrine: devein, declaw, decimate the sea and other animals, eventually emulsifying them into a paste which could then be riven with whole vegetables. It was like describing to somebody how to paint a Monet, how to turn the beauty of the earth into a blurry, intoxicating swirl, like something seen through the eyes of the dying.
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Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat offers a tense, poetic, and emotionally harrowing account of a fateful dinner party in which couples at various stages of life and love intersect.
Rebecca Lee is the author of the novel The City Is a Rising Tide. She teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
‘The world through [Rebecca Lee’s] eyes is a complicated, fabulous place.’
— Trish Crapo, Women's Review of Books
‘Rebecca Lee, has a satirist's grasp of the nuances of idealism. She also has an imaginative sense of place, whether evoking New York in the booming '90s or Mao's Beijing not as material locations but each as a unique state of mind.’
— Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe
‘Lee is an elegant storyteller who gracefully interweaves her many threads and minor characters — nonprofit vultures, missionaries and assorted friends.... [The City Is a Rising Tide] is a poetic exploration of lives suspended between then and now.’
— Christine Smallwood, The Nation