Travails in Heartland (The Ruthless Cosmopolitan) (Volume 1)

In 1969, the year a man walks on the moon, a dating service opens for business behind the Iron Curtain with a $100 price tag on red brides. Under cover of its tractor-driving pin-up, the Soviet Empire is offering women to the West in exchange for currency. Based on their untold diaspora, Travails in Heartland spins the surreal, absurd adventures of a family of mail-order brides assailed by ever “curiouser” wonders, operated behind the scenes and across strange lands by such modern-day enchanters as insurance broker-cum-televangelists, circus-owning generals, charity-fundraising serial killers and tomb-raiding ministers of culture. As their dream of emigration turns them into perpetual wanderers, the women, progressively stripped of their identities, metamorphose into stock characters from fairy tales, the immigrant novel, romance, historical and detective fiction, The Thousand and One Nights and the Bible (among others), cropping up now as top models at “foreign-body” benefits, now as waifs and wicked stepmothers in the primeval forests of Heartland, Natural History Museum exhibits, or agents of the Revolution destined for the guillotine. How rapidly the heroines of lore can fathom this game of cultures with its ever-shifting rules will determine not only whether they live to see their next “love’s labor,” but also whether any sense of rootedness (illusory as it may be) in a nation, a family, oneself, can survive the leap of faith into the world. Travails in Heartland is the initial volume in The Ruthless Cosmopolitan trilogy.