A Portrait Of The Artist-American As A Young Woman; From the ever-popular author of Chelsea Girls and Not Me, a masterpiece of a novel that rewrites the picture of what fifty years of female life looks like today; Cool For You is a darkly comic novel that traces the downbeat progress of an Irish-American girl through a series of stuttering efforts to leave home. The novel's tough-girl narrator wants to be an astronaut but like most things fails miserably. Instead, she becomes a poet and takes us on a ferocious tour of the solar system, crummy schools, pathetic jobs and unmade beds. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women - how they do and do not get out of the hands of the family and the State. It is a book about institutions of all sorts - loony asylums, Catholic schools, summer camps and colleges - and a heroic individual's busting free of them. Eileen Myles is probably the best-known indie poet in America. Her lyrics can be heard on the groundbreaking girlband CD Welcome to Villa Villa Kulla with Sleater Kinney, and she is best known for Chelsea Girls (published by Black Sparrow), a collection of short stories that established her as a living legend to a generation of women ready for their own literary movement. In 1992 she ran for President of the United States as an 'openly female' candidate, and lost. She lives in New York City.