Time's a Thief A Novel

It’s the mid-1980s in gritty, vibrant New York City when Francesca “Chess” Varani strikes up a volatile friendship with drama-queen classmate Kendra Marr-Löwenstein. Drawn into the orbit of Kendra’s Salingeresque family, Chess moves into their Greenwich Village home when she graduates from Barnard and takes a job assisting the infamous literary intellectual Clarice Marr. There she receives the sentimental education and emotional roughing up New York bestows on all its young hopefuls—including a doomed love affair with Clarice’s troubled son.

Narrating her story twenty years on, from the winter of the 2008 financial crisis, a sadder but wiser Chess evokes her youth with all the poignancy of time passing—and all the weight of choices made and not made.

B. G. Firmani is a graduate of Barnard College and holds an MFA from Brown. Her short fiction has been published in BOMB Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. She lives in New York City.