137 x 203mm, 280 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2026

Separating from her long-term partner Jack and beginning a passionate affair with a much younger female student, the narrator of Lee & Elaine takes time off to write. Leaving Manhattan for an off-season Springs, East Hampton, rental and haunting the Green River Cemetery where artistic giants of the mid-twentieth century are buried, she becomes obsessed with the lives and friendship of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, who were both artists and the wives of famous men. They were always so peripheral, she writes. Suddenly I wanted to find out about these women. Find them, period.

First published by Serpent’s Tail’s in 2002, the novel was republished as an ebook in 2013 by Emily Books. Written with Rower’s trademark louche and brilliant, mouthy, and deceptively casual style, it remains a forgotten classic of the turn of the millennium. With piercing and hilarious straightforwardness, the narrator turns the process of unearthing art-world gossip and tearing down her own life’s substructure into a searching and original examination of sexuality and friendship, art and ambition.

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