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 so Gioacchino has been buying from the scattered descendants of its original owners the remaining jigsaw pieces of it. Restoring the ruined palace proved a more herculean enterprise than he had initially imagined.

Only after 15 years of reconstruction was house completed, in 1981, the same year that Mirella, his first wife, died. The palace is schizophrenic. On its street face, on the Via Butera it is surrounded by & slum. Its other side is brilliant Mediterranean. A white and yellow stucco Louis XVI facade, sunny and inviting, overlooks the harbor & a 4-lane highway. Across the highway looms Luna Park, a year-round funfair.

You can read more at the New Yorker (subscription required).

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 is the shuffle of slippers across a wooden floor.

It is the noise of my childhood, the noise my mother made at odd hours, trailing through our New York apartment, looking for some book hidden away in the back-hall bookshelf or perhaps trying to figure out where she’d put her to-do list. My mother, like me, was a stay-at-home writer, and unless she was going out to lunch, she spent her days curled up in bed with a stack of books and papers or scuffing about the apartment on undefined quests.

Suddenly I can picture the weird clumpy slippers this otherwise chic woman wore throughout the 1960s and much of the ’70s: black suede booties lined in white lambswool and fastened with huge Flintstone-type bone buttons that looked as if they’d come from a mastodon tusk. Bedroom slippers designed to survive arctic exposure, or a Park Avenue apartment from which my warmer-blooded father had insisted on removing all the radiators.

You can read the full text here.

“The consistently sold out, Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, chosen by New York Magazine and NY Press as the best reading series in NYC, and singled out by the New York Times Magazine for helping to “Keep downtown alive,” features the most interesting storytellers, writers, musicians, raconteurs and personalities, and requires the readers to take one public risk, while the musicians, who perform two short sets with their original, lyric-driven music, are required to play one cover song and try to get the audience to sing along. Called the “most vital authors’ series in the city,” by Time Out NY, and known for its consistently good taste, Happy Ending has launched careers and proudly, ended none.” – From Joes’ pub.

For tickets and information click here.

This originally appeared in the New Yorker, November 4th, 1996

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 shorts are patrolling on mountain bikes. A new K mart arrows the heart of midtown. At SoHo openings, there are more toddlers than artists, and the toddlers are wearing Gap: family values rule.

Fashion–now more than ever New York’s defining industry–appears to have gone populist. In fashion-ad supplements as thick and juicy as penny dreadfuls, a white-bread goofiness reigns… The ingratiating normality of the models is matched only by the normality of the sweatpants and sneakers they’re hawking. “Fashion” is no longer something rarefied, labor-intensive, exclusionary: it is our lingua franca. New York City garbage collectors wear T-shirts that–in what looks like aa pun on Donna Karan’s logo–say “DSNY.”… High fashion is what Fruit of the Loom and Oshkosh B’gosh deliver cheap.

I meet an old school friend who teaches college English. Over a cup of coffee at a Starbucks on her block, she utters a familiar complaint: her twenty-year-old students are very pleasant, but they have no interst in ideas. Politics, literary theory, the clash of warring universals died before these kids bought their first pair of Rollerblades. What has replaced ideology in our contemporary pantheon? Life style. Frappuccino, moccaccino, cybercino. In-line gelato and on line gelator. Softwear and sportswear… The Gap girl wearing a cross tells me The old American covenant of assimilationism has been superseded. You no longer have to renounce yoru ethnic or sexual or religious particularity in order to make it. The life style that fashion celebrates is so omnivorous it can even handle Jesus.

You can read more at the New Yorker (subscription required).

“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 figure out whether or not I want to take the plunge and buy the book. Now, thanks to Marshal Zeringue, I may just have found a system.”

My own book, Rat, comes out pretty decently on the p. 69 test.

 Fernanda Eberstadt grew up on Park Avenue, in a wealthy bohemian family that threw parties attended by the likes of Jackie Kennedy.

Recalling her childhood home, she wrote in the New York Observer, “There was a gold Andy Warhol Marilyn in the living room and an alabaster statue of a panther from a Greek temple.” She published her first book at twenty-five, and her novels chronicled a Manhattan that counterposed intelligence and money in a most delicious way. Eberstadt specialized in witty, sharply observed class collisions, such as the love affair in The Furies (2003) between uptown highflier Gwen and Lower East Side eccentric Gideon (leader of the Pants on Fire puppet troupe) or the entanglement between Minimalist-art collector Dolly and Basquiat-esque artist Isaac in When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth (1997).

But in the late ’90s, Eberstadt left New York and moved to Perpignan, a French city near the Spanish border. There she wrote Little Money Street (2006), a fascinating account of the local Gypsy clans she befriended. Eberstadt found in Perpignan “an older, shabbier, weirder Europe of my childhood dreams, a Europe which I imagined to have been effaced by decades of postwar prosperity.” This shabby, weird Europe—a coastal town in southern France awash in ethnic violence and populated by Gypsies, immigrants, and the French equivalent of white trash—is the backdrop for her fifth novel, Rat, a strange and sometimes enchanting coming-of-age tale. Eberstadt’s fascination with people who live on the fringes, whether starving artists or Romany musicians, finds expression in the character of Celia (nicknamed Rat), a girl with so much freedom even local Gypsy children are jealous. No adults hover over her in the playground to ward off would-be molesters; no parents harass her to clean her room or turn off the TV.

Rat is practically a modern-day fantasy of an autonomous child. Not that she has much choice in the matter. Her independence has been thrust on her by her single mother, Vanessa, a free spirit who makes her living as a brocanteuse: gleaning, foraging, and then selling her treasures from a market stall.

Despite the lax supervision, mother and daughter are emotionally and physically close, stuck together in the tiny lair of their apartment (once the wine cellar of a farmhouse). But as Rat heads toward adolescence, two male intruders disrupt this dyad: First, Vanessa takes in Morgan, the young son of a neighbor dying of HIV, and then she allows a malevolent loser boyfriend to move in. Rat begins to dream of running away to her father, Gillem McKane—a man she’s never met. The wild-child son of a legendary British model, Gillem made a summer pit stop in a provincial French town years ago, knocked up a teenage Vanessa, and never spoke to her again.

In Little Money Street, Eberstadt discovers that Gypsy life is far more constrained and hierarchical than we imagine; likewise, Rat’s freedom is not what it appears. She and her friends roam the jagged landscape and make play spaces out of industrial ruins, such as a cavernous old dynamite factory (“room enough for a whole village of miscreants each to pursue undisturbed his contraband vocation”) and a deserted World War II bunker atop a cliff. But hanging over them is the threat of violence (the bunker was cemented shut after a girl was raped there), as well as the risk of being taken from their homes: “Every kid who isn’t actually stuck to some family unit with Super Glue can in theory be taken into Care.”

Rat’s life is utterly precarious, and Eberstadt zooms in on the girl’s growing awareness of her situation as she begins to question the wisdom of Vanessa’s choices. In a lovely description of mother-daughter friction, Eberstadt writes: “Rat was still jealous of her mother’s attentions, still needed Vanessa’s love, but in a warier, more combative sort of way: love not as baby talk and butterfly kisses and sleepy limbs entwined, but as a hard back-board against which to slam your grievances. Wide-awake love, challenging, that would answer all her whys.” That need for whys leads her on a quest across France to find her father: a road trip that veers between plucky adventures and harrowing—for Rat, unprecedented—perils.

Both dreamier and starker than her previous novels, Rat is Eberstadt’s ambitious attempt to burrow into the skin of someone who scarcely knows herself. A child’s point of view is such a skewed perspective that it can create huge blind spots for novelists. Vanessa hangs over the narrative like a ghost, an unformed and sometimes unpleasant character glimpsed only in her daughter’s sidelong glances. And Rat’s adoptive brother, Morgan, who becomes her sidekick, barely gets a word in edgewise. When we meet him, he’s practically mute; as soon as he starts to talk, Rat “discovers that his imagination is dark, fearsome, vindictive, that he’s never forgotten a mean look anyone gave him, that for him the world is full of traps, of enemies waiting to humiliate him, cheat him of what’s his.” In fact, he gets up to some disturbing high jinks, but Eberstadt refrains from delving into his personality, treating him instead as an accessory, a showcase for Rat’s motherly affection and fierce will to survive.

Rat feels like an eerie, angular fairy tale, though it’s hard to say which is the stronger fantasy for American readers: the rich, faraway dad who holds the promise of a comfortable life or the wild, ramshackle existence that Rat flees. Indeed, Eberstadt has conjured an intense romance for readers in a culture whose children almost never have a chance to hitchhike through the countryside, create imaginary universes out of ruins, or get lost in the woods, even for a moment.

Joy Press, the former culture editor of Salon and the Village Voice, is a writer in New York.

“When her mother’s predatory new boyfriend moves in, she decides to do just that, embarking on a journey across France to the English Channel and beyond. With a light touch, Eberstadt conjures the wolves and unexpected fairy godmothers of youth. When it comes to finding love, we are all teenage vagabonds.”  —Megan O’Grady

Read more here >

Here you will find all my books, and some of the stories behind them. I will also try to add posts to the journal and events sections so please come back or add me to your feed readers to keep up to date.

I am very excited about my new book RAT, which you can read all about here.

Enjoy the site, and feel free to drop me a comment.

– Fernanda

4.30 pm, Saturday April 3rd.

Voltaire Books
330 Simonton Street

Key West, Florida

Telephone: 305-296-3226

NYC Reading

7 pm, Wednesday April 7th.

192 Books
192 Tenth Avenue at 21st Street, NYC 10011

Paula Cooper Gallery. www.192books.com

Baltimore Reading

6.30 pm, Tuesday April 13th.

Ivy Bookshop

6080 Falls Road

Baltimore, MD 21209

Telephone: 410-377-2966

Fernanda Eberstadt is also being interviewed on Wednesday, April 7th on the Lewis Frumkes Show, WPAT-FM, 11 to 11.30 am

and on “The Global Cafe,”  at WSYCFM from 12 to 12.30 pm.