Jennifer Banash is a former professor of English and creative writing, and author of the novels
Silent Alarm, a finalist for the American Library Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults;
White Lines;
Simply Irresistible;
In Too Deep; and
The Elite.
Her new novel is
The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana.
At Electric Lit Banash tagged
seven "books about losing your way on the climb to the top, where the pursuit of fame and power beyond your wildest dreams may be the ultimate devil’s bargain." One title on the list:
Beauty by Brian D’Amato
Welcome to the not-so-distant future, where human faces can be sculpted like putty by the right pair of gifted hands. A modern-day Frankenstein that interrogates our 
cultural obsession with beauty and youth, D’Amato depicts the glamorous and seedy world of Manhattan in the ’90s from the POV of Jamie Angelo, a marginally successful painter whose side hustle is performing amateur plastic surgery on the elite in his downtown loft. But when Jamie decides to “create” a celebrity, using his girlfriend Jaishree (whom he renames Minaz) as his muse, and becoming a surgical Svengali in the process, he descends down a rabbit hole of depravity and soullessness, turning Jaishree into not only a cultural icon, but a literal monster.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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