Coming in 2026 from Heresy Press. Available for pre-order from Amazon.
“Alexander’s beautiful style with flowing sentences and delicious phrases glorifies female beauty in a society which often finds is threatening and in turn threatens it. She writes with a light touch, apparently following Nabokov’s dictum to caress the detail.
Despite danger and tragedy in the background, this is a humorous and satirical novel, highly entertaining and thought provoking. I haven’t enjoyed reading a novel this much since I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal.” —Josip Novakovich, author of Apricots from Chernobyl and Honey in the Carcase
“Full of surprises, The Girlie Playhouse subverts cliché. Alexander is a serious stylist who is not afraid to ruffle feathers.” —Charles Holdefer, author of Don’t Look at Me and Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic
The demi-monde of strippers seen from a female perspective. Beneath the deceptively plain language of the story is a more complex train of thought—subtly satirical, shocking in effect and surreptitiously subversive. —Tom Newton, author of Fabian: A Cubist Biography and Warfilm
The Girlie Playhouse is narrated by “Pixie,” the daughter of a famous cabaret dancer who was murdered by a sanctimonious preacher. In flashbacks, she describes that tragedy, which has filled her with loss and longing. Pixie admits that she has a thing for “girls with meretricious charms.”
After college, she becomes a stripper herself and meets Trixie in 1992 who reminds her of her own mother. Max, a regular at the Girlie Playhouse, thought he was happily married until he saw Trixie. They begin a relationship, but we learn early on that Trixie will also end up dead, and the story unfolds as a kind of whodunnit and why.
When Max wins seven million dollars in the lottery, his life and relationships get scrambled. Max takes Trixie and six other dancers away for the weekend and gives them each a red sports car. The tabloids have a field day and the strip club becomes, for a time, the fulcrum of feminist protests, frantic press coverage, and new customer influx. Max demands that Trixie ends her career as a stripper but she refuses, which contributes to her tragic undoing.