Fiction. Del Hanks is on the verge of academic tenure, but at forty she's also perched on the precipice of either the beginning or the end of the rest of her life. BLACK STAR is a dark comedy, both bitingly funny and transgressive, an unflinching and unsentimental exploration of the female experience, academia, and the idea of power that burns in the mind as white as acid. Medved's new novel is a searing critique of a world we all know too well--one of sexual exploitation, manipulation, and the subtle machinations of power that BLACK STAR filters through the lens of academia. It is at once poetic, tragic, disturbing and funny.