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.
Read More“an ambitious resourceful novelist with a lush style” (John Updike)
Fernanda Eberstadt, an ambitious, resourceful novelist with a lush style and a Manhattan background, has written, in “Little Money Street: In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France”
Read More“Fernanda Eberstadt’s shrewd and sensuous novel"
But throughout that gilded childhood, Eberstadt longed for another existence, for the footloose life of the willfully dispossessed. In her novels, idealists and fast-trackers wrestled with thorny problems of love and social identity. After her family’s move to the French countryside, her lifelong fascination with Gypsies inspired a nonfiction book about their haunted music and lives. “Flamenco,” she wrote, “is the art of desperate measures, the winning of a fugitive grace from failure, bankruptcy, shame.” That fugitive grace, that rag-picking of hope from ruin, resurfaces in Eberstadt’s shrewd and sensuous fifth novel, “Rat.”
Read MoreArtsfuse: "a splendid novel"
Readers should not be put off by the title, for this is a splendid novel, interesting in the risks it takes, in its ambition and scope—a book that deserves to be savored and discussed.
Read MoreVogue: Review of Rat
"Eberstadt conjures the wolves and unexpected fairy godmothers of youth. When it comes to finding love, we are all teenage vagabonds.” —Megan O’Grady
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Rat
“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
Read MoreLuc Sante: "Passionate, at once exhilarating and despairing"
“Passionate, at once exhilarating and despairing, a rich and profound work of high non-fiction literature. A portrait of the Gypsies of southwestern France, it is also about family, about consumerism, and about the ruthlessness of a world in which there is no more open road.” – Luc Sante.
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Little Money Street
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.
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The Furies
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.
Read MoreWhen the Sons of Heaven meet the Daughters of the Earth
From Booklist
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.
Read More"stunning " - Daily Beast Review of Rat
A Writer's International Wanderings. From the Manhattan of Andy Warhol to gypsy camps in France, novelist Fernanda Eberstadt has made her life exploring unusual settings. She speaks to Susan Salter Reynolds about her own journey and her stunning new novel, Rat.
Read More"intelligent, exhilarating" - New York Times Review
There are many pleasures here, one of which derives from Ms. Eberstadt's affectionate observation of New York. An avant-garde opera attracts "a honking, hissing gaggle of young men in spatter-painted dinner jackets and military buzz cuts.
Read More"ambitious, intelligent" - Kirkus Reviews on When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth
An ambitious, intelligent portrait of the emergence of a gifted painter, and a sly, convincing depiction of the exotic fringes of the New York art scene. Isaac Hooker (introduced in Eberstadt's Isaac and His Devils, 1991) is, as the novel begins, a hapless if brilliant young man adrift in Manhattan, having fled New Hampshire (and his loyal girlfriend) to make something of himself.
Read More"flows like a sun-spangled brook on a bright spring day" - Booklist
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.
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Isaac and his Devils
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.
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Low Tide
“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