Books by Stacey D'Erasmo
A Seahorse Year
In Stacey D’Erasmo’s acclaimed second novel, a quintessentially modern family is ultimately transformed by the emerging breakdown of their teenaged son, Christopher. When he disappears from his San Francisco home, his extended family comes together in a frantic search. But Christopher is in much more trouble than they know, and their attempts to support him and to save him will challenge their assumptions about themselves and one another.
Exquisitely crafted, A Seahorse Year is an absorbing read that explores the ways in which love moves us to actions that have both redemptive and disastrous consequences, sometimes in the same heartbeat.
"A Seahorse Year compellingly explores love's connections and limits . . . [D'Erasmo] writes with a graceful, sometimes devastating directness, in clear, crisp phrases lined with subtle lyricism." -- Boston Globe
"Beautiful, addictive . . . an elegant, glancing humor flecks the book . . . wonderfully observed ." -- Newsday
"You could read Stacey D'Erasmo for the subtlety of her insights or the beauty of her language or for her tumbling, shifting arrangements of plot and characters . . . Or you could just open A Seahorse Year and be mesmerized." -- The Advocate
Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of the novel Tea, which was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and a Book Sense 76 Pick. A Seahorse Year, her second novel, was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. She lives in New York City.
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A Seahorse Year
Stacey D'Erasmo's new novel, following the highly acclaimed Tea, is a powerful and beautiful book about a pivotal year in the life of a quintessentially modern family. In contemporary San Francisco, an extended family is transformed by the emerging breakdown of a troubled adolescent boy. The lives of those who love Christopher -- his mother, Nan; her lover, Marina; his gay father, Hal; and Christopher's loyal girlfriend, Tamara -- are pushed to the edge by something new in him that mystifies them all. When he runs away, far into the woods of nothern California, their assumptions about themselves and one another are sorely tested. They might not, they discover, be quite so modern as they once thought. Even the dried seahorses on Marina's windowpane rattle unnervingly as if to announce a time like no other.
In precise, lyrical language, A Seahorse Year explores love at the limits of bearability. It is wise about the things we do out of love that often have both redemptive and disastrous consequences. Difficult questions that have all the tough complexity of real life are asked; devastating truths are revealed in the answers.
Michael Cunningham described Tea as "pure and profound, a ravishing book." A Seahorse Year is an even richer, more luminous achievement.
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Wonderland
by Stacey D'Erasmo, Annie Leibovitz, Tommy Kovac, Anna Wintour
An NPR Best Book of 2014
A Time Top Ten Fiction Book of 2014
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A BBC Top Ten Book of 2014
"Exquisite...As inspiring in its way as Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids." —Los Angeles Times
“Briskly addictive . . . Told in the voice of a female rock Ulysses.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“Marvelous . . . D’Erasmo conjures up the seedy, sexy spectacle of life on the road with amazing vividness, and fills in the inner life of a woman who has one last chance to get her voice heard.” —Lev Grossman, Time
Anna Brundage is a rock star. She was an overnight indie sensation, but lost her fame just as fast as she found it. Now forty-four, she pours everything into a comeback, selling her famous father’s art to finance an album and a European tour. A riveting look at the life of a musician and the moving story of a woman’s unconventional path, Wonderland is a glimpse of how it feels when a wish just might come true.
“Anna made me think of Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, mixed with a little bit of Janis.” — Paste
“Richly interior . . . What makes Anna such a powerful narrator is her seductive desire to keep her options open.” — Washington Post
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Wonderland
by Stacey D'Erasmo, Annie Leibovitz, Tommy Kovac, Anna Wintour
Among the numerous curiosities that have gone unexplained in the classic tale Alice in Wonderland, perhaps the most perplexing might be who, exactly, is the “Maryann” that the White Rabbit mistakes Alice for at the beginning of the story? Lewis Carroll first made us ponder this and, years later, Walt Disney again made viewers wonder who Maryann might be in his classic feature length film based on Carroll’s book.
Now, the amazingly talented folks at SLG Publishing, through a licensing deal with Disney, have finally answered this age-old question. In their beautifully executed comic book series, WONDERLAND, readers experience Alice’s fantastic world as they’ve never seen it before. Writer Tommy Kovac’s Wonderland is missing Alice herself, but it’s still populated by the other characters that make the world such a curiously exciting place. The Queen of Hearts is present, barking orders to lop off people’s heads, as is the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and the rest of Wonderland’s beloved cast. And there are some new faces, too, including the book’s main protagonist, the mysterious Maryann herself. All are beautifully illustrated by Wonderland’s artist, Sonny Liew.
The graphic novel will collect the six issues that comprised the Wonderland comic series in a beautiful, collectible, jacketed hardcover edition.
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Wonderland
by Stacey D'Erasmo, Annie Leibovitz, Tommy Kovac, Anna Wintour
“[A] gorgeous anthology of fashion images … Leibovitz is nothing less than America’s greatest living photographic portraitist … she has changed fashion photography forever.” – Anna Wintour
Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz’s surprising account of her encounters with fashion over five decades
‘Looking back at my work, I see that fashion has always been there,’ Annie Leibovitz observes in the preface to Wonderland. ‘Fashion plays a part in the scheme of everything, but photography always comes first for me. The photograph is the most important part. And photography is so big that it can encompass journalism, portraiture, reportage, family photographs, fashion ... My work for Vogue fueled the fire for a kind of photography that I might not otherwise have explored.’
Includes 350 extraordinary images (many of them previously unpublished) featuring a wide and diverse range of subjects: Nicole Kidman, Serena Williams, Pina Bausch, RuPaul, Cate Blanchett, Lady Gaga, Matthew Barney, Kate Moss, Natalia Vodianova, Rihanna, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Karl Lagerfeld, Nancy Pelosi. With a foreword by Anna Wintour.
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The Complicities
“ELECTRIFYING—A TREASURED WRITER WORKING AT THE HEIGHT OF HER POWERS.” —Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears
A haunting and emotionally fraught story of a woman dealing with the ripple effects of her husband’s financial fraud—and with what she knew, or pretended not to know, about it
After her husband Alan’s massive white-collar crimes are exposed, Suzanne’s wealthy, comfortable life shatters: Alan goes to prison, and Suzanne files for divorce. Ignoring a steady stream of calls from her ex at Norfolk State Prison, Suzanne thinks she can cleanse herself of all connections to her ex-husband and their old life together. Instead, she decamps to a Massachusetts beach town where she creates a new life and identity.
Then Alan is released early, and the many people whose lives he has ruined demand restitution. At the same time, awestruck and obsessed by the spectacle of a major whale stranding on a beach near her home, Suzanne makes an apparently high-minded decision that in turn reverberates not only through Alan’s life as he tries to rebuild but also through the lives of their son, Alan’s new wife, his estranged mother, and, ultimately, Suzanne herself.
A resonant and bitingly perceptive story about the people next to the bad guys—the queasy and ambiguous territory people like Suzanne inhabit as they stand by, and the ways in which they try to thread the needle of their culpability—The Complicities is a searing look at moral responsibility, and about who, in the end, pays for a crime.
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$27.00
The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry
The author of The Art of Intimacy asks eight legendary artists: What has sustained you in the long run?
How do we keep doing this―making art? Stacey D’Erasmo had been writing for twenty years and had published three novels when she asked herself this question. She was past the rush of her first books and wondering what to expect―how to stay alive in her vocation―in the decades ahead.
She began to interview older artists she admired to find out how they’d done it. She talked to Valda Setterfield about her sixty-year career that took her from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to theatrical collaborations with her husband to roles in films. She talked to Samuel R. Delany about his vast oeuvre of books in many genres. She talked to Amy Sillman about working between painting and other media and between abstraction and figuration. She talked to landscape architect Darrel Morrison, composer Tania Léon, actress Blair Brown, and musician Steve Earle, and started to see connections between them and to artists across time: Colette, David Bowie, Ruth Asawa. She found insights in own experience, about what has driven and thwarted and shaped her as a writer.
Instead of easy answers or a road map, The Long Run offers one practitioner’s conversations, anecdotes, confidences, and observations about sustaining a creative life. Along the way, it radically redefines artistic success, shifting the focus from novelty and output and external recognition toward freedom, fluidity, resistance, community, and survival.
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$17.00
The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between
The first work of nonfiction by Stacey D'Erasmo, author of the New York Times Notable Books Tea and The Sky Below
"What is the nature of intimacy, of what happens in the space between us? And how do we, as writers, catch or reflect it on the page?" Stacey D'Erasmo's insightful and illuminating study examines the craft and the contradictions of creating relationships not only between two lovers but also between friends, family members, acquaintances, and enemies in fiction. She argues for a more honest, more complex portrait of the true nature of the connections and missed connections among characters and, fascinatingly, between the writer and the reader. D'Erasmo takes us deep into the structure and grammar of these intimacies as they have been portrayed by such writers as Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and William Maxwell, and also by visual artists and filmmakers. She asks whether writing about intimacy is like staring straight into the sun, but it is her own brilliance that dazzles in the piercing and original book, The Art of Intimacy.
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