Description: Something made her risk a look at the reader, who took a sip of black coffee. And another. She turned the pages. She pursed her lips. Flannery abandoned her breakfast and watched the woman drink her coffee. It wasn't that she wanted the coffee herself. That wasn't it. Rather, she wanted to be the coffee; she envied the dark drink its chance to taste those lips.

In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. Flannery, a seventeen-year-old. new to everything around her -- college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life -- is shocked by her own desire to follow this beauty wherever it takes her. By chance she finds herself enrolled in a class taught by the remote, brilliant older woman; intimidated at first she gradually becomes Anne Arden's student outside class as well. Whatever the subject -- Baudelaire, lipstick colors -- Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day she learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.

A bittersweet, exhilarating, sentimental education, pages for you confirms Sylvia Brownrigg as "one of the most exuberantly agile minds among younger American writers" (Dan Cryer, News-day) and is her sexiest most poignant work to date.

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