An Ideal for Living

Grace White and her brother Robert, overweight and affluent, are desperate to hang onto their respective love interests. Grace's husband Rich is bonking every woman he can talk into bed. Grace is willing to look beyond his affairs if she can just have her marriage back. Robert's law school fling James's interest diminished as Robert's waistline increased, but Robert has never moved on. The only solution? Losing those excess pounds… by any means necessary. And when James finds a supernatural healer who can sculpt living flesh like clay, beautiful ugliness ensues. Will Robert and Grace get what they want, or what they deserve? In An Ideal for Living, Marshall Moore has written a shocking fantastique, a novel that captures the Zeitgeist of contemporary urban life, where beauty is a commodity craved, consumed, and traded. Marshall Moore is the author of four novels (Inhospitable, Bitter Orange, An Ideal for Living, and The Concrete Sky), four short-fiction collections (A Garden Fed by Lightning, The Infernal Republic, Black Shapes in a Darkened Room, and Love Is a Poisonous Color), a collection of essays Sunset House, and a memoir I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Litro, Storgy, Passengers Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He is also the co-editor of three academic books on the pedagogy of creative writing and publishing. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University. A native of eastern North Carolina, he lives in Cornwall, England, and teaches creative writing and publishing at Falmouth University.