Worthy

Worthy is told in imperfect but inventive English by Ludmilaor Worthy, as she comes to be knowna retired” con artist from Eastern Europe managing an eccentric, failing strip club in Tampa for her lover, Leo. Though there is much she won’t reveal, she gradually weaves the story of her love affair twenty years earlier with Theodore, an erratic literature professor who embraces an ideology built around what he calls the Four Books: Mann’sConfessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, Nabokov’s Despair, Melville’sThe Confidence-Man, and Camus’s The Fall. Seduced by the scofflaws in these novels, Theodore and Worthy transform themselves into confidence artists, a tempest of shared madness that carries them from New York to Mexico City to the South of France. Yet Worthy’s narrative leaves the listener with more questions than answers, from what happened to Theodore to the reasons she abandoned her young son Mirek in Montana, and why his pursuit is now haunting her.

With the linguistic acrobatics of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and the confessional force ofThe Fall, Lisa Birnbaum weaves a tale of deception, invention, and love lost and left behind, where even language is unreliable.

Lisa Birnbaum’s work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and spoken word performance has been supported by numerous grants and writers’ residencies. Her writing has appeared in such journals asConnecticut Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarter After Eight, and Kestrel. She teaches writing and literature at the University of Tampa and lives in Tampa, FL.