A thirty-year-old virgin embarks on a quest to find true love in this rediscovered post-modern tragicomedy.

“She was a virgin and her virginity had burrowed in. . . . the idea of sex had such a grip on her that she tried to avoid, totally, thinking about sex.”

At thirty years old, Fortune Dundy is desperate to relinquish her virginity to the right man—preferably one worthy of her elaborate fantasies. Yet despite her dazzling wardrobe of spangles, rhinestones, and synthetic animal skins, and her persistent appeals to an automated dating service, every suitor seems to evaporate as soon as she says, "How do you do?" Her only confidant is "Bert," named for the real-life host of the televised Miss America pageant, who lives in her head, narrating the dramatic stageplay of her mind. Arriving in Los Angeles from her small Southern hometown, Fortune strives for reinvention, chasing romance through personal ads, costume parties, and trips to the beach at a "swinging singles" apartment complex called Villa Dionysus.

Sophisticated, highly stylish, and crackling with wit, Cynthia Buchanan’s Maiden, originally published in 1971, should today be as celebrated as the fiction of Eve Babitz, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath. A glitter-and-blood tragicomedy of the fantasies of romance, persona, and California, it feels startlingly contemporary—an American literary original and a forebear to Helen DeWitt, Nell Zink, and Patricia Lockwood. Maiden’s Fortune Dundy is one of literature’s most memorable and lovable antiheroines: endlessly charming, painfully deluded, and hell-bent on self-destruction.