Jane Vandenburgh

The Wrong Dog Dream

By accident or miracle — her characteristic bad luck finally changing — Jane Vandenburgh had found the love of her life, married him and moved to Washington D.C. There she found herself living in a fairytale city full of famous and powerful people, invited to The White House to hear her husband discussing Yeats with the President of the United States. And into this fabled chapter of the writer’s life comes what seems at first to be the perfect dog, an English Springer Spaniel, named Whistler. So why is it that it’s exactly then she starts dreaming of the techs bringing the wrong dog out to her when she goes to pick him up from boarding?
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Architecture of the Novel

Jane Vandenburgh offers aspiring writers the tools they’ll need to get a draft of a book on paper, a how-to approach as practical as it is inspirational. Based on the novelist’s experience writing both her critically acclaimed long-form fiction and nonfiction, Architecture of the Novel reveals the underlying machinery propelling the interlocking gears of plot and story and demonstrates to writers at every level how to write a book dynamic and coherent, also powerfully and uniquely  told.
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A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century

Jane Vandenburgh’s eventful childhood went spectacularly awry as her mother became increasingly unstable and her architect father—arrested repeatedly in gay bars in L.A.—committed suicide. She then went to live with an aunt and uncle who already had four kids and issues of their own. From these beginnings, this cultural history as coming-of-age story is launched.
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The Physics of Sunset

Published in 1999 to rave reviews, this is a smart, witty, sadly ironic story of neighbors in Berkeley who become lovers. The novel explores the notion that even a doomed passion may have a place in a person’s spiritual life. This story has been called “the erotic novel for intellectuals.”
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Failure to Zigzag

Continuously in print since its first publication in 1989, Jane Vandenburgh’s first novel tells the story of Charlotte Black as she grows up fatherless in a crazy family. Set in Southern California in the 1960s, the book paints a vivid portrait of Katrinka Ainsworth, Charlotte’s more-than-haphazard absentee mother, whose real career veers between carnival ventriloquist and mental patient.
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