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, who admits that she has a thing for "girls with meretricious charms," becomes a stripper herself and meets Trixie?who reminds her of her own mother?at a club called the Girlie Playhouse. Max, a regular at the joint, thought he was happily married until he saw Trixie and begins a relationship with her. After Max wins the lottery, he splurges a share of the winnings on the exotic dancers in the Girlie Playhouse, fueling a media frenzy and prompting feminist protests at the venue. When he demands that Trixie quit stripping, he sets in motion a chain of events that leads to her undoing. At once delicate and risqué, this uninhibited story looks closely at the strip club business while probing the inner lives of dancers and their customers.

V. N. Alexander has published three literary fiction novels-Smoking Hopes (recipient of Washington Prize for Fiction), Naked Singularity (a Dallas Observer's "Best of 2003" book), and Locus Amoenus (a Dayton Literary Peace Prize nominee). In addition to her literary credentials, Alexander is an authority on Vladimir Nabokov's theory of butterfly mimicry, she is a 2020 Fulbright Scholar in Russia, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center alum, and a former Public Scholar for the New York Council for the Humanities.