Overview

When Christopher Sorrentino's mother died in 2017, it marked the end of a journey that had begun eighty years earlier in the South Bronx. Victoria's life took her to the heart of New York's vibrant mid-century downtown artistic scene to the sedate campus of Stanford and finally back to Brooklyn--a journey witnessed by a son who watched, helpless, as she grew more and more isolated, distancing herself from everyone and everything she'd ever loved. In examining the mystery of his mother's life, from her dysfunctional marriage to his heedless father, the writer Gilbert Sorrentino, to her ultimate withdrawal from the world, Christopher excavates his own memories and family folklore in an effort to discover her dreams, understand her disappointments, and peel back the ways in which she seemed forever trapped between two identities: the Puerto Rican girl identified on her birth certificate as Black and the white woman she had seemingly decided to become. Meanwhile Christopher experiences his own transformation, emerging from under his father's shadow and his mother's thumb to establish his identity as a writer and individual--one who would soon make his own missteps and mistakes. Unfolding against the captivating backdrop of a vanished New York--a dangerous, decaying, but liberated and potentially liberating place--Now Beacon, Now Sea is a matchless portrait of the beautiful, painful messiness of life and the transformative power of even conflicted grief.

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Reviews

""Mothers and sons have rarely been captured with such dark intimacy as in Now Beacon, Now Sea."" -- ""Esquire"" ""With excoriating candor, with empathy enough to give you gooseflesh, [Sorrentino] gleans exciting new clues in that never-ending mystery, the lives of the artists."" -- ""Los Angeles Review of Books""

Author Information

Christopher Sorrentino is the author of six books, including Trance, a National Book Award finalist, and The Fugitives. His work has appeared in Esquire, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Playboy, and many other publications. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, The New School, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. He lives with his family in New York City. Paul Bellantoni is an experienced voiceover artist and audiobook narrator who has worked on a wide range of projects. Also an award-winning opera singer, he has performed in opera houses across the United States and Europe--including at Carnegie Hall, where he held a solo concert. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

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