The Blondes

The Blondes is a hilarious and whipsmart novel where an epidemic of a rabies-like disease is carried only by blonde women, all of whom must go to great lengths to conceal their blondness.

Hazel Hayes is a grad student living in New York City. As the novel opens, she learns she is pregnant (from an affair with her married professor) at an apocalyptically bad time: random but deadly attacks on passers-by, all by blonde women, are terrorizing New Yorkers. Soon it becomes clear that the attacks are symptoms of a strange illness that is transforming blondes--whether CEOs, flight attendants, students or accountants--into rabid killers.

Emily Schultz's beautifully realized novel is a mix of satire, thriller, and serious literary work. With echoes of Blindness and The Handmaid's Tale amplified by a biting satiric wit, The Blondes is at once an examination of the complex relationships between women, and a merciless but giddily enjoyable portrait of what happens in a world where beauty is--literally--deadly.

EMILY SCHULTZ is the co-founder of the literary journal Joyland. Her previous novel, Heaven Is Small, was named a finalist for the Trillium Book Award alongside books by Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, as wasThe Blondes. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Brian Joseph Davis. The inspiration for The Blondes was a Gucci ad featuring murderous looking blonde women in a Vanity Fair magazine. Emily's story about her masquerading as a blonde was featured in Elle Magazine. A blog post from Emily entitled "How I Spent the Stephen King Money" recently went viral.