From a wild and ingenious stylist—a hilarious debut novel about marriage plots, movie-watching, and maternal inheritances.

Meet Betty Block—docile daughter, woebegone wife, aspiring aspirant, and anti-heroine for the ages! Or is the narrator of Madeline McDonnell’s farcical, heartbreaking, and formally brilliant first novel just another woman caught in the sneakily patriarchal plots of the early-aughts? And has she left her ostensibly sensitive husband for an hour or two or forever? As Betty pulls up a chair at the Lonesome Ballroom and tries to explain herself to Lizzie, her erudite-but-distant bartender, she finds herself as trapped by her generation’s competing expressions of sincerity and sarcasm as her mother was by the incomplete feminism of the ’70s and her grandmother by the insidious sweetness of Hollywood’s Golden Age. An inquiry into gender’s relationship to popular aesthetics that swirls from ancient epics to turn-of-the-millennium reality shows, mid-century melodramas to neo-noir car chases, beauteous battle scenes to boy-next-door meet-cutes, Lonesome Ballroom is also a dazzling and rambunctious performance in prose.

Out March 4, 2025 from Rescue Press.

\ \ \

Lonesome Ballroom swept me right off my feet—its giddy language and irresistible narrator leading me in a wild dance of multigenerational myth-making. Madeline McDonnell is a fearless and soulful original. 

—SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM

Madeline McDonnell is a brilliant sound-worker, and Lonesome Ballroom is a gleaming, teeming symphony of a novel. What a magnificent dive into film, fashion, feminism, motherdom, and the manifold performances that make up a life. 

—LENI ZUMAS

Lonesome Ballroom totally dazzled and deranged me. Its prose is a delight, by turns acrobatic, funny, and poetic, and its narrator, Betty, is full of rage, longing, and a drive to tell her story—even as she is undone by the narratives imposed on her. I've long admired Madeline McDonnell's daring and beautiful work, and I can't wait for the world to read this ingenious, important novel. There is nothing like it—and it's a wonder. 

—EDAN LEPUCKI

Madeline McDonnell’s novel, Lonesome Ballroom, is a beguiling conspiracy of beauty. Forgive me, did I say novel, I mean bejeweled hand grenade. For Lonesome Ballroom is a literary firestorm and every wondrous word a weapon against the brooding brutes whose prideful and vainglorious tales McDonnell muffles and mutes with a silk-gloved fist. In McDonnell’s tour de force, her war-torn cri de coeur, we fall forever for Betty—a woman under the influence, a woman on the verge. But unlike Cassavetes or Almodóvar, McDonnell neither fears nor fetishizes femininity. She luxuriates in the daring glamor of her heroine’s contradictions. Like the silent women in Cindy Sherman’s film stills, Betty is a study in passive rage and rageful passivity. Betty is a fur coat of feral ermine, a ball gown of broken glass. Unabashed and unafraid, Betty emerges from the insidious glow of the dimming gaslight into her own fiery truth. Madeline McDonnell is a literary powerhouse.

—AMBER DERMONT

Madeline McDonnell's Lonesome Ballroom is a novel that is also a novel about a girl who is also a girl in a world that is also a world. Reading McDonnell is to watch a haunted, brilliant seamstress pull at the thread of the story she is telling and use what she's unraveled to tell the story she is untelling. What a gorgeous, weird book that completely redefines the borders of self-actualization, composition, and delight.  

—SABRINA ORAH MARK

Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom has gifted us Betty, a woman painfully in thrall to what every woman knows: that we are too often defined by what we are to others. Well, Betty refuses. The only way out is to smash everything to bits. Will she? Can she? I feel delightfully pulverized by this bright, desperate, mordantly funny voice. 

—LINDSAY HUNTER

\ \ \

Read an excerpt at Cleveland Review of Books.

\ \ \

Or try one of Madeline’s other pranks books, also published by the bestest press, Rescue Press!

\ \ \

If you’re interested in ugliness, prettiness, the ugliness of prettiness, lexicography, grotesquely blinkered consciousnesses, facile if prepossessing dreams pressed in upon by hideous speech, weddings, penthouses, distressing intercessions and collapsing registers, puns, illustrations, corrosive cloistering, karaoke, wack(y) dark experiments, Veuve Clicquot, or the disgusting distortions and cartoonish contortions wrought by femininity, riches, romance, and race, you might be interested in the fictional dictionary entry…

Beautiful and strange and funny and uncomfortable and totally fucked up, and, God, what gorgeous sentences!

—EDAN LEPUCKI

\ \ \

If you’re a fan of mother-daughter stories, father-daughter stories, khaki pants, weekends in the country, soused second-wave feminists, blundering baby basketballers, bird imagery, the lure of illness, the lure of the glittering crash, Subarus, Hondas, ambiguous pregnancies, rueful yet unrepentant passivity, drawered torsos, sonic plotting and static arcs, you might be a fan of the story trio…

Madeline McDonnell writes shrewdly, responsively, inventively, audaciously, arrestingly. She approaches the story as a hang-glider approaches the wind, bending herself to its movements.

—KEVIN BROCKMEIER