Applause
by
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I didn’t really know this man. Was I just one of a number of starry-eyed college kids who were always crowding around the amiable and handsome professor with his direct gaze and crooked smile that seemed to me to be halfway between laughing and crying? For most of the time I had been aware of him, he had been unavoidably married. That had held me back as much as anything from making a complete fool of myself and perhaps hurting him somehow. But everything had changed.
Light began to fill the sky. He was coming down the steps toward us with some young man—Lee Henderson, I think—whom I’d known since grammar school and with whom I’d shared many childhood games and secrets, but never this one, that I was so crazy about William Langley. I dared to look at the professor now from the closest I’d been in years. He was thinner than I remembered, and his hair was tinged with gray. There were shadowy places under his eyes, and he seemed not to be standing as straight as usual. I had better give a damn brilliant answer.
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About the Book
After admiring UCLA’s popular English professor and poet, Dr. William Langley for eleven years, twenty-seven-year-old graduate student Sela Hart is finally accepted into one of his exclusive creative writing classes. She has had her own work published and studied in Africa, and he has had a stressful twenty-year marriage to a lesbian woman while struggling to balance his world with the demands of academia. But the forty-year-old Langley is intrigued by Sela’s strange stories, while she is drawn to his emotional reeling at the sudden death of his wife in a horrendous car accident. The two become friends and then lovers, being touched along the way by Langley’s late wife’s gay friends, a Tanzanian man who cares for endangered animals, and Sela’s grandmother, who raises the only blue rose in the world. As Sela’s stories about an aging actor named William Hathaway and a girl named Angela Star—who may or may not be real—intensify, Langley begins to show signs of mental confusion and illness. The fictional Chalice River from Sela’s Quantum Crossing collection becomes a real place for him—one that is lonely, dark, and frightening. When he is ultimately swept away in a déjà vu car accident just yards from where his wife died, his only hope is the power of Sela’s passionate tale and her invincible love.
About the Author
Elizabeth Cain was a secondary teacher for thirty-one years in California. She has won numerous poetry awards and has written five novels. She currently lives on more than two hundred acres of the Blackfoot Valley in Montana with her husband, Jerome, and their menagerie of sled dogs, cats, and horses.