The Beheading Game

by Brenda Webster

Set in New York, this story follows a gay couple's personal struggles with serious illness and coming out issues, all set against a contemporary version of the medieval English story, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Brenda Webster was born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore College, Columbia University, and University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. She is a freelance writer, critic, and translater who splits her time between Berkeley and Rome, and she is the current president of PEN West.

Her latest novel, VIENNA TRIANGLE, explores the loves and rivalries in Sigmund Freud's inner circle that led to the death of his disciple Viktor Tausk.

Webster has written two controversial and oft-anthologized critical studies, Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study (Stanford University Press) and Blake's Prophetic Psychology (Macmillan), and translated poetry from the Italian for The Other Voice (Norton) and The Penguin Book of Women Poets. She is co-editor of the journals of the abstract expressionist painter (and Webster's mother) Ethel Schwabacher, Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (Indiana, 1993). She is the author of two previous novels, Sins of the Mothers (Baskerville, 1993) and Paradise Farm (SUNY, 1999), and a memoir, The Last Good Freudian (Holmes and Meier, 2000). The Modern Language Association recently accepted for publication Webster's translation of Edith Bruck's Holocaust novel Lettera alla Madre.