The Madhouse Nudes
a novel by
" The Madhouse Nudes is a gripping, moving story, enhanced by all the virtues of first-rate fiction."
--George Garrett
When the painter John Ordway moves from New York to a small Iowa town and hires two local women as models, his work and life deepen and complicate in unforeseen ways, probing the question: What does it mean for a man to see a woman truly? Subtly conceived and artfully executed, The Madhouse Nudes is part love story, part mystery—a brave exploration of guilt and innocence.
John Ordway is an artist working in the tradition of the female nude. In New York City that preoccupation merely aroused the ire of feminist art critics, but now that he and his girlfriend, Jamie, a potter and weaver, have retreated to tiny Delphi, Iowa, he finds himself the object of a more pointed suspicion.
Then Jamie leaves him, and one of his local models is attacked. Surrounded by judgment and no longer able to view his work with detachment, he is forced to question the impulses that drive him to it. As events approach their crisis, he must answer questions of urgent personal importance: What is the fate of a body in the world? And what does it mean for a man to see a woman truly?
Art collides with life, painfully and revealingly, in this evocative first novel, which brings a poet's sensibility to the charged question of women's bodies and men's desires.
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First edition, cloth cover |
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THE MADHOUSE NUDES has been selected by the new Lutheran Writers Project as an inaugural choice for its Lutheran Writer's Book Club. Read an interview with Robert Schultz about this selection (“How do you feel about being labeled a ‘Lutheran Writer?'” etc.), and download discussion materials at http://www.lutheranwriters.org/Book_Club_Selections.html.
THE MADHOUSE NUDES was published in a cloth edition by Simon & Schuster in 1997, the film option was purchased by Wild Card Productions of San Francisco & New York, and on the basis of the novel Robert Schultz received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. Loess Hills Books, a fine arts literary press, issued a trade paperback edition in 2006. The current paperback edition, by Simon & Schuster, was issued February 2008.
Purchase The Madhouse Nudes at
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Simon & Schuster Edition News Release
Critical Praise for The Madhouse Nudes
(Audio Clip) Interview with Robert Schultz on Public Radio WVTF-FM's "Studio Virginia"