This originally appeared in the New Yorker, November 23rd, 1991 Part of the palace used to belong to Gioacchino’s cousin & adoptive father, Giuseppe Tomasi (1896-1957), the last Prince of Lampedusa, who wrote the novel The Leopard. Lampedusa lived in this house for the final 12 years of his life. Over the past 3 decades or ......
read more..Archive for Journalism
Below is an excerpt from a piece Fernanda wrote for More. It is late morning—well, actually, maybe it’s more like early afternoon. I am wandering around the house in my pajamas, trying to remember where I left my cup of coffee, when I notice a strangely familiar sound: an aimless, arrhythmic sort of sound that ......
read more..On my return, I am shocked by the city's new squeaky-cleanness. New York exceptionalism--exceptionally dangerous, exceptionally grouchy, exceptionally dirty--has been replaced by a well-scrubbed homogeneity. Suddenly, Manhattanites are importing trends invented in outer America. Irish bars have given way to Seattle coffee bars. Police officers in s...
read more..Here's something I wrote for MarshalZerengue's blog, based on the theory that everything you need to know about a book can be learned by sneaking a peek at p. 69 "I read a massive amount of contemporary fiction, and yet I am one of those indecisive cheapskates who loiters in bookstores, skimming through the Recent Release shelves, trying to figu...
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“Whether it is the immediate drama of Rat’s loss of innocence (‘her blithe assumption that other people were basically well-intentioned’) or her sometimes painful independence from the mother she loves (“from worship to apartness to wary but still infinitely tender”). the plainspoken, direct prose and the beautif...
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Fernanda Eberstadt's new book,
Rat, is available in paperback from Amazon • Barnes and Noble • Borders • Powell's • IndieBound (support independent book stores) -
Fernanda Eberstadt by Marion Ettlinger
“An ambitious resourceful writer with a lush style and a Manhattan background”—John Updike, Due Considerations
“Fernanda Eberstadt is blessed with more gifts than any one writer should be. She saturates her novels with wantonly vivid images, creates characters more thoroughly realized than most people you know, swings from yuppie jive to epigrammatic eloquence without losing her balance, and seems to know everything about everything, from the Old Testament to the coffee shops of Madison Avenue. Her prose is exuberantly, obscenely rich.” —Janice P. Nimura, Washington Post
“A novelist of exhilarating wit, incandescent metaphors, moral curiosity, and deep-sea psychology. Eberstadt’s mythic and piercing tragedy belongs beside the work of Franzen, Chabon, even De Lillo.” —Booklist
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