The Princess of 72nd Street

“Like Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed or Iris Owens’s After Claude, [The Princess of 72nd Street] is a slender, accomplished and frequently funny work told from the perspective of a lively and bruised female consciousness.”—The Washington Post

“‘Princess Esmerelda,’ as the unforgettable narrator of this unclassifiable novel calls herself, is an Upper West Side bohemian who feels herself about to embark on a ‘radiance.’ … This 1979 novel sends us careening into the princess’s world, watching through our fingers as the bad decisions pile up, yet admiring, in a way, her determination to be the person she is.”—Slate

“Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street lyrically details the seventh ‘radiance’ experienced by a young figure painter named Ellen who … makes witty observations about creativity, femininity, and public life with a voice that feels startlingly modern.”—NYLON

“Irresistibly intriguing … [The Princess of 72nd Street] is bold, beautiful, challenging and charming.”—The Guardian

“At the novel’s crux is the tension between freedom and autonomy … [Kraf] fits right into the [Torchbearers] series’ mission.”—TLS

“[A] prismatic take on female agency and mental health … We’re finally catching up with [Kraf’s] pioneering mind… . What’s more, as the world lurches further to the far-right, Kraf’s third eye on female liberation makes her writing as vital as ever.”—The Quietus

“This slender novel immerses us in the brilliance of its world so we feel as far from madness as its protagonist does.”—Financial Times

“It’s hard for me to believe I only just read this book for the first time this winter. And I’m happy for everyone else that it’s getting reissued this year. I love the way Kraf writes, she jams so much into her sentences.”—Sophie Kemp, Document

“A raggedy genius is finally queened, bringing a fairy-tale ending to this cracked, dark story of the old West Side.”—Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

“When a novelist tells a good story well, it becomes a good novel. When a novelist uses words as if they were sacred love, what is written becomes poetry. Elaine Kraf is a poet.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A frenetic and glittering manifesto, wherein a woman wrestles—or dances—with the most misunderstood parts of herself … a well-deserved reintroduction of what is bound to be a beloved classic for contemporary young women.”—Olivia Gatwood, author of Whoever You Are, Honey

“Kraf writes … about the habits of madness without trivializing the grimness and pain.”—The Village Voice

“It is one of the marvels of this book that Elaine Kraf manages to be so recklessly fantastical and so coolly perceptive at the same time.”—Jen Silverman, author of There’s Going to Be Trouble

“There are astonishingly affecting contrasts of the sordid and sad, the detached and misaligned. The Princess of 72nd Street is a serious, important piece of contemporary fiction.”—Booklist

“An electric portrait of one woman’s blazing unraveling.”—Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe

Elaine Kraf (1936-2013) was a writer and painter. She was the author of four novels: I Am Clarence (1969), The House of Madelaine (1971), Find Him! (1977), and The Princess of 72nd Street (1979). She was the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts awards, a 1971 fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 1977 residency at Yaddo. She was born and lived in New York City.

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