Other Life Forms Release Party!

Sylvie, a frustrated sculptor-turned-waitress, decides to play an unusual prank: she hangs missing person posters featuring her own face in order to see who might call.  But the prank takes an unexpected turn when a handsome stranger swoops in to save her from herself and a band of cocky artists and writers takes her under its wing.  Before she knows it, she’s literally the poster child for an avant-garde movement that quickly veers out of control.  Meanwhile, Sylvie struggles to come to terms with the death of her college sweetheart, a shy gamer, who, struggling to adjust to life after graduation, retreated to an online fantasy world and never returned.

Lampooning both the conservatism of Orange County and the privileged youths who rebel against it, Other Life Forms is a hilarious and deeply moving account of a late bloomer’s search for identity, a quirky meditation on what it means to be an artist and a woman when neither mode of being seems sustainable.

“Julia Glassman’s writing is stunning, unflinching, and pitch-perfect. She knows what is going on inside the dazed silences of her characters, and she moves with clarity toward a rare understanding.” –Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven and The Size of the World

“Julia Glassman seems to know everything there is to know about those drifting years between college and adulthood when you feel that you could become anything and might become nothing. She has written a first novel of great compassion, sly humor, and graceful insight.” –Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead and The Illumination