The Vixen

It’s the steamy summer of 1953, the year the Rosenbergs are executed for spying. Our hapless hero, Simon Putnam, a Jewish boy from Coney Island, has just graduated from Harvard with a degree in Icelandic folklore and, predictably, no job prospects. But his uncle, famous literary critic Madison Putnam, snags him a junior editor gig at a boutique publishing house run by Warren Landry, a WASP-y former OSS spy during World War II. He taps Simon to work with Anya, the beautiful—dare we say, vixenlike—author of a novel portraying Ethel Rosenberg as a sexy Mata Hari type. Simon, whose mother knew Mrs. Rosenberg, wants to rewrite the book with a more nuanced story line, but he’s falling in love with Anya. Plus, Landry’s publishing house is broke, and sales from this trashy spy novel could keep it afloat.