Cooperative Village [Perfect Paperback]

Frances Madeson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2007

Having flamed out in her job in the executive offices of Nurses in Neighborhoods NY (NINNY), the fictional Frances is keeping a low and lonely profile while considering how best to rise from her metaphorical ashes. Her hiatus abruptly ends, however, when she discovers Lana Plotsky, her elderly neighbor and fellow Cooperator, dead on the laundry room floor. As Frances can t just leave Mrs. Plotsky there, she improvises a solution, which in short (and outrageous) order subjects her to the purview of the USA Patriot Act! Is her next stop Guantanamo Bay? Will she have to ship out before, or after, the shiva for Mrs. Plotsky? This delightfully over-the-top tale of life, love, and liberty in lower Manhattan spoofs an equal-opportunity cast of unforgettable characters who somehow miraculously manage to make their way, and mostly get along together, in the 21st-century American urban village they proudly call home: Cooperative Village.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...has the virtues of being both entertaining and thematically coherent...pitched somewhere between outright satire and what used to be called 'black humor'...The off-kilter comedy...is established immediately and creates a consistently off-kilter world. --Daniel Green, The Reading Experience

...smart, macabre satire of the War on Terror...Madeson's Kafkaesque plot defies the blurb...but an 'anti-Bush Weekend at Bernies for the shiva-sitting set' might be an apt description. --Justin Moyer, Washington City Paper

Her deadpan nonchalance makes you shiver and chuckle...Any slightly guilty, lapsed Jewish New Yorker or anyone with bitterness toward our current administration...will get a kick out of Cooperative Village... --Melissa Korn, Downtown Express

About the Author

Playwright and novelist, Frances Madeson, holds degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and the Graduate School and University Center of City University of New York. She began her career as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor in Washington, D.C., and has worked in NYC law firms and nonprofit organizations for more than 20 years. Since leaving full-time employment in 2004, she has written three novels. Cooperative Village is her debut book.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Carol MRP Co.; Original edition (May 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979277205
• ISBN-13: 978-0979277207
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,785,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars you'll never do laundry the same agian, January 2, 2008

By 

Nycsubwayrat (Brooklyn NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cooperative Village (Perfect Paperback)

Cooperative Village is a laugh from cover to cover. Madeson hits the nail on the head, capturing the essence of living in a co-op in New York City, with it's cross section of colorful characters. The adventures she takes you through makes you want to turn the pages as fast as you can, because you won't believe it could get nuttier and it just does...
Can't wait for the next book

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A unique, wacky, wild ride of a political commentary, December 23, 2007

By 

Getyourownbeer57 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cooperative Village (Perfect Paperback)

Fran Madeson's "Cooperative Village" is a wacky, wonderful, and frequently hysterically funny antidote for whatever George Bush has managed to do to you. I rarely laugh out loud when reading a book and I really did when I read this one. Madeson's imagination and voice are simply unlike other authors out there. It's a story, it's a political commentary, it's a cockeyed look into the world of little old Jewish ladies who rock.

5.0 out of 5 stars If it don't kill you, laugh, December 6, 2010

By 

Willard R. Johnson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cooperative Village (Perfect Paperback)

There is a thread, dark skirting on despair, underlying the humor of this wonderfully disturbing book. The word 'hysterical' comes to mind, cropping up in all its several semantic fields. The Francis of narrative is driven by a desperation so acute that seeing a corpse through an entire wash-and-dry cycle in the cooperative Laundromat passes for a rational response to life in the Village: life conditioned by a level of obligatory artifice suffocatingly upbeat and right-minded--a thoroughly dehumanized 'liberalism.'

This is a deeply political book, but it's a politics that engages the disembodied cultures of what Joe Bageant has called the American Hologram, and cuts across the anachronistic distinctions of left and right, liberal conservative, progressive reactionary, an urban parallel to the literature of deconstructed suburbia, or perhaps, what happens when that same suburban misappropriation of the pursuit of happiness invades, infects and perverts the city with what is euphemistically termed, `gentrification:' the construction of sterile islands, pale ghosts of the gated communities to which the real masters have retreated, suspended above the soil of earthly existence and embodied human life and community by threads, cables chains and shackles of convention everyone agrees to pretend are invisible.

Cooperative Village is an account of how Frances, by every choice she makes, conscious or unconscious, goes about cutting her way out of the web. How perfectly appropriate, that in the end--in the view from the web... she vanishes from existence... or non-existence. This reader wishes her well, that beyond the automatic gates and doors of the Cooperative Village--she may find there is still the possibility of real life on this good earth.