Don't look at me

Charles Holdefer, 1959-

Book - 2022

"Meet Holly Winegarten, a campus celebrity and painfully self-conscious young woman trying to come to terms with being six feet, nine inches tall. Sidelined by injury from a basketball career, she develops a fascination for Emily Dickinson, an American icon famed for her self-effacement. Holly discovers lost love letters and learns that Dickinson's clandestine lover was an immigrant Irish workingman who served as a wartime substitute for her cherished brother, Austin. This discovery makes Holly a target for academic careerists, who aren't afraid to play dirty. Also on Holly's mind: the future of her own misfit brother, Honus, and her budding romance with a neuroscientist. Holly longs for intimacy in a world where appeara...nces rule, and she must confront political conformism and risk embarrassing exposure in order to defend larger truths about an America still divided by war. Humorous and poignant, Don't Look at Me is an unblinking portrait of how literature still excites and disrupts our lives"-- more