Overview

In Marriage to the Sea, the Zamarins, a Jewish family of artists and activists, navigate the eco-crisis, political turmoil, personal losses, and the afterlife. In their love stories and adventures--spanning Paris, Venice, and a dreamy phantasmagorical underworld--each of them searches for the overlap between what the world needs and what they have to give. When Katya, a rebellious bi+ sustainability activist, is visited by her father's ghost one night, she decides he's urging her to change her life. She and her youngest sister Arielle--a recovering addict and Shakespearean actress past her ingenue sell-by date--head to Paris on a quest to help his environmentalist heroine, and, along the way, they discover unexpected new loves among the living and the dead. Their Aunt Julia (a TV villainess returned to experimental theater) also falls recklessly in love, just as her meddling brother--and the whole theater company--arrive to stay with her. At every turn, the characters are forced to navigate a world in which the sea is rising and new social movements are taking shape.

Full Product Details

9781961897847

Table of Contents

Reviews

Marriage to the Sea, set in Santa Cruz, Paris, and Venice, as well as in the world of dreams and the liminal border between life and death, weaves a sumptuous literary tapestry. The search for lasting love in a precarious world forms the heart of intertwining narratives, with engaging, complex characters: actors and artists, environmental activists, kitchen helpers, and recovering addicts. As it unfolds, Marriage to the Sea grows ever more fascinating and more beautifully rich in language and insight. A dazzling saga of art and political activism, loyalty and betrayal, family, idealism, and the quest for healing. --Lillian Howan, author of The Charm Buyers At once Dantesque, Orwellian, and Shakespearean, Sarah Stone's Marriage to the Sea is a kaleidoscopic shifting between the psychic spaces of dream, myth, art, earthly pleasures, fates and families, passions and terrors. In this sensuous, philosophic book, Stone places artists and activists on the edge of apocalypse and posits humanity's relatively short ascendence as a devised theatrical performance with each of us an actor, responsible, consciously or not, for Earth's fate, our fate. A seer's handbook for survival and an impassioned ars poetica, Sarah Stone's Marriage to the Sea is a bold, prophetic masterpiece. --Melissa Pritchard, author of Flight of the Wild Swan and A Solemn Pleasure I am blown away by this gorgeous fiction, so filled with dreams and quests, mirroring, art, and love. This immersive world urges us to contemplate how a human being can live with terrible loss, of a parent, a sibling, a city, a world. I love this band of beautifully imagined characters, who wrestle with sorrow and discover an abundance of paths forward. A radiant, inspiring book, rich in startling humor and profound wisdom. --Harriet Scott Chessman, author of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper and The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas

Author Information

Sarah Stone is the author of the novels The True Sources of the Nile and Hungry Ghost Theater, a finalist for the 38th Annual Northern California Book Awards. She is also the coauthor, with her spouse and writing partner, Ron Nyren, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Sarah's work has appeared in Image, Ploughshares, 100 Word Story, StoryQuarterly, The Millions, Scoundrel Time, The Believer, CRAFT, Alta Journal online for the California Book Club, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, and elsewhere. She is a former LABA Fellow and a facilitator of the Jewish Studio Process and has taught for UC Berkeley, the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and Stanford Continuing Studies, among other places. She has written for and taught on Korean television, reported on human rights in Burundi, looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute, and worked as a psychiatric aide in a locked facility, a graveyard-shift waitress in the restaurant where everyone went after they'd been thrown out of all the bars in town, and an office worker in an apparently haunted massage/bodywork school in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available