Books by Jane Ransom

Jane Ransom's Bye-Bye is a darkly comic first novel, both sexy and profoundly philosophical. The protagonist/narrator is a bisexual divorcee in Manhattan who assumes a false identity in an effort to escape the past and to spy on her own life. While exploring issues of gender and self, Bye-Bye deals provocatively with performance art, S&M, personal ads and art in the 90s.

She is having three affairs at once: with an S&M pornographer, a beautiful woman found through a personal ad, and a randy heterosexual bartender. Two of her lovers don't know her real name...and that's exactly how she wants it. To escape her past, and perhaps find herself, this smart, troubled, and hilariously cynical young New Yorker is fabricating another identity. As Rose Anne Waldin, or Rosie, she doesn't have a mother who still haunts her, nor an ex-husband who kicked her out after her numerous infidelities. But she does have a new apartment, dyed hair, different clothes -- and an obsession with murder. It is Rosie's intention to break society's taboos, test its limits, push the envelope...and get away with a shocking, perhaps violent, act. With an intoxicating velocity, Bye-Bye pulls us into the netherworld of the New York performance art scene, the steamy arena of sexual pick-ups and put-ons, and the back alleys of a broken heart. Award-winning first novelist and poet Jane Ransom has created a daring black comedy, a psychological thriller edged with an utterly original class of conundrum. Fearless, erotically charged, and ultimately affirming about the catharsis of fantasy, creativity, and desire, Bye-Bye is a fast, literary, brave new read.