4 Blondes

When I was in grad school, every single craft or fiction class began with the instructor asking each student about their favorite writer. I’d say Candace Bushnell, partly because it’s a great followup to GuyInYourMFA types competing over who has read the most obscure (male-authored) litfic. But mostly because she’s legit one of my favorite authors.

Absolute genius retellings of Edith Wharton, snarky and insightful comments on class, wealth and gender, and her novels can just be read as fun and engaging fiction, too. 4 Blondes is kind of a forgotten one, but it’s such a great book and there are semi-prequels to both of my Bushnell favorites, Trading Up and One Fifth Avenue, in here. The prequel short stories are such fun reading, plus you can see her developing her characters and themes before writing those two amazing novels. I reread One Fifth about once a year, and Trading Up almost as much. Oddly, even though I love and reread these ones regularly, I don’t really care about her most famous book, Sex and The City, or any of those spinoffs, and Killing Monica is a SatC spinoff, too.