Samantha at Coney Island, and a Thousand Other Islands

Marietta Holley, the celebrated satirist once called 'the female Mark Twain,' turns her wickedly funny eye on early American marriage and the dawn of leisure culture in this sparkling comic novel. Samantha Allen is a woman of practical sense in an impractical world: she keeps a tidy home, maintains reasonable expectations, and married a man named Josiah who has the infuriating habit of developing enthusiastic obsessions. When Josiah falls under the spell of their friend Serenus Gowdey's colorful tales of Coney Island, Samantha finds herself battling not just her husband's wandering attention, but the entire glittering, ridiculous world of summer amusement. What unfolds is a comedy of manners that uses the chaos of Coney Island as a lens to examine marriage, gender expectations, and what it means to pursue happiness in an age of newfangled distractions. Holley's dialect humor and sharp social observation make Samantha one of the great comic voices of American literature: exasperating, affectionate, and utterly unforgettable.