In this genre-defying, illuminating book, Eberstadt explores the lives of a handful of outrageously brave men and women—saints, philosophers, artists--who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society. In this genre-defying, illuminating book, Eberstadt explores the lives of a handful of outrageously brave men and women—saints, philosophers, artists--who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society.
“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 beautiful storytelling combine to produce a novel that is mythic, gritty, and unforgettable.”– Booklist
Eberstadt’s first work of non-fiction, based on her six years in Perpignan’s Gypsy community and her friendship with one Gypsy family, each of whose children has chosen a quite different way of negotiating the conflicts between modernity and tribal belonging.
It’s Manhattan in the 1990s. Gwen Lewis is an ambitious high-flying young consultant jetting between the ex-Soviet republics and a condominium on the Upper West Side. She has family money, a banker-boyfriend: She thinks her life is perfect. Then one day, Gwen meets Gideon Wolkowitz, an impoverished sweet-talking puppeteer who works in an anarchist squat on the Lower East Side.
Eberstadt's new novel flows like a sun-spangled brook on a bright spring day. It continues the saga of New Hampshireman Isaac Hooker that began in Isaac and His Devils (1991), but no prior knowledge of Isaac is required for total immersion in this astute, animated, and funny tale about the sublime and the ridiculous in love and art.
Set in rural New Hampshire, the novel’s hero is Isaac Hooker, a half-deaf, half-blind, hugely fat and ambitious boy-genius and his struggle to fulfill his parents’ blighted dreams.
“This is a bouillon cube of a book; it’s so condensed…[it] makes a meal for six…We view the action through a veil of sweat and tears, licking our lips so as not to miss the salt…’Low Tide’ is a book that leaves its mark.”
–Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, The New York Times Book Review
