The Girls, English edition

Adapted from THE GIRLS by Emma Cline, available everywhere June 14th, 2016.

I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.
 
I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. Then their jewelry catching the sun. The three of them were far enough away that I saw only the periphery of their features, but it didn t matter I knew they were different from everyone else in the park. Families milling in a vague line, waiting for sausages and burgers from the open grill. Women in checked blouses scooting into their boyfriends sides, kids tossing eucalyptus buttons at the feral-looking chickens that overran the strip. These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.
 
I studied the girls with a shameless, blatant gape: it didn t seem possible that they might look over and notice me. My hamburger was forgotten in my lap, the breeze blowing in minnow stink from the river. It was an age when I d immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short, and I saw right away that the black-haired one was the prettiest. I had expected this, even before I d been able to make out their faces. There was a suggestion of otherworldliness hovering around her, a dirty smock dress barely covering her ass. She was flanked by a skinny redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought. As if dredged from a lake. All their cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park. Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by some feeling they couldn t name. Women reaching for their boyfriends hands. The sun spiked through the trees, like always the drowsy willows, the hot wind gusting over the picnic blankets but the familiarity of the day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across

Emma Cline is from California. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House and The Paris Review, and she was the recipient of The Paris Review 's Plimpton Prize for Fiction in 2014.

Spellbinding . . . A seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry . . . [Emma] Cline gorgeously maps the topography of one loneliness-ravaged adolescent heart. She gives us the fictional truth of a girl chasing danger beyond her comprehension, in a Summer of Longing and Loss. The New York Times Book Review

[The Girls reimagines] the American novel . . . Like Mary Gaitskill s Veronica or Lorrie Moore s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, The Girls captures a defining friendship in its full humanity with a touch of rock-memoir, tell-it-like-it-really-was attitude. Vogue

Debut novels like this are rare, indeed. . . . The most remarkable quality of this novel is Cline s ability to articulate the anxieties of adolescence in language that s gorgeously poetic without mangling the authenticity of a teenager s consciousness. The adult s melancholy reflection and the girl s swelling impetuousness are flawlessly braided together. . . . For a story that traffics in the lurid notoriety of the Manson murders, The Girls is an extraordinary act of restraint. With the maturity of a writer twice her age, Cline has written a wise novel that s never showy: a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror. The Washington Post

Outstanding . . . Cline s novel is an astonishing work of imagination remarkably atmospheric, preternaturally intelligent, and brutally feminist. . . . Cline painstakingly destroys the separation between art and faithful representation to create something new, wonderful, and disorienting. The Boston Globe

Finely intelligent, often superbly written, with flashingly brilliant sentences, . . . Cline s first novel, The Girls, is a song of innocence and experience. . . . In another way, though, Cline s novel is itself a complicated mixture of freshness and worldly sophistication. . . . At her frequent best, Cline sees