Christopher Sorrentino - Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Sons Memoir

Praise for Now Beacon, Now Sea

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

Acute, intimate and exceedingly fair... This is the story of a son who is trying to dissect and understand the love that remainsand sometimes emergesafter death. We may have a greater cultural appetite for eulogies, but an autopsy, in looking directly at the cold corpse of a family in all its gruesomeness and mystery, can be just as profound, and in the hands of a writer as restrained and humane as Sorrentino, just as beautiful.

Eleanor Henderson, The New York Times Book Review

For fans of Vivian Gornicks memoirs that bring back a New York thats pretty much vanished at this point... Its a very clear-headed look at a family and what it means to come from strange people, which we all do, by definition.

John Williams, The New York Times Book Review podcast

Mothers and sons have rarely been captured with such dark in-timacy as in Now Beacon, Now Sea, an open wound of grief and regret.

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.

John Domini, Los Angeles Review of Books

Now Beacon, Now Sea is an ambitious balancing act of summary and scene that painstakingly reveals an unsettled mind doing the work of reconfiguring its understanding of the past.

Richard Scott Larson, Chicago Review of Books

Sagacious and heartbreaking... Christopher Sorrentino has written a stunning, gutting memoir about his life as the son of a chronically depressed mother and a celebrated writer father.

Nell Beram, Shelf Awareness

An unvarnished portrait of a family... A sharp, sad tale of bit-terness and regret.

Kirkus Reviews

[A] raw and intimate memoir... Even at its darkest, this rich narrative shines.

Publishers Weekly

Christopher Sorrentinos memoir is an incredibly moving mas-terpiece. Now Beacon, Now Sea is a coming of age story set in a place whose time was coming to an end as told through the comforting, confounding, and crushing story of Sorrentinos relationship with his mother. I had to reach back to Nabokovs Speak, Memory to find another memoir as powerful and poignant as this one and to find one that as profoundly explores the art of memory.

David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

Few, if any, are the memoirs of mothers and sons that are as ex-coriating and unforgettable as Christopher Sorrentinos Now Beacon, Now Sea. Written equally in wrath and powerfully and patiently illuminated love, Sorrentinos account of filial anguish will linger long in memory. What an imperative contribution to the memoir form and to our literature generally. I could not admire this book more.

Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm and The Long Accomplishment

The mother at the heart of Sorrentinos absolutely compelling memoir represents a generation of women whose lives were based on mystery and chance, on reinvention and the fierce reach for survival. But its the sharpest shards of detail in her existence that make this so readablethis sons talent for capturing the secret life of a woman once his unreachable light, the beacon, and then the diffuse memory of the sea.

Susan Straight, author of In The Country of Women

Every genre, every form, has its strengths and weaknesses; the memoir, especially the contemporary American memoir, can fall into a default mode of progress narrative. One of the many accomplishments of Christopher Sorrentinos extraordinary new book is the way in which it refuses to sentimentalize, even slightly, its brutal material. Now Beacon, Now Sea is impressively astringent art.

David Shields, author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day Youll Be Dead and The Trouble with Men

As irresistible as it is unflinching, Now Beacon, Now Sea is a family memoir, a literary memoir, an American memoir, a memoir about the nature of identity in our timeand if that means only Christopher Sorrentino could have written it, for all its singularity it does what riveting memoirs do: reveals not only its own secrets but ours as well.

Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn

In memoirs by great novelists any distance between those arts shrinks, imagination and testimony lending prose the clarity of an engraving. Put Christopher Sorrentinos accomplishment in Now Beacon, Now Sea with Roths Patrimony, Schwartzs Leav-ing Brooklyn, Gornicks Fierce Attachments, Conroys Stop-Time, books in which the necessity of commanding trauma onto the page has galvanized the language from within.

Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Arrest

Praise for The Fugitives

Elegantly constructed... Satisfying. Given that big novels often seem to warrant attention just for their size, it is its own kind of daring for an author to aim for the understated, the concise and the perfectly joined.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The New York Times Book Review

The Fugitives, rife with Sorrentinos dark wit and acute cultural observations, does not disappoint.

Dana Spiotta, BOMB

An entirely new kind of novel with exceptional interior mono-logues animated by deception, double-dealing and a doomed af-fair that lends an air of existential dread to the story.

Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times

A dynamic and enigmatic tapestry of cross-pollinated genres populated by some terrifically drawn and profoundly unreliable narrators... Sorrentino brings a pristine beauty to every multiple subterfuge, while delivering scene after scene with near surgical precision. His pacing is immediate, deliberate, and simultaneously sidereal. The Fugitives is effortlessly expansive, finely crafted, and an absolute pleasure to read.

Donald Breckenridge, Los Angeles Review of Books

Smart and mordant... Brilliantly cranky.

James Camp, Bookforum

The language of The Fugitives is at once remarkable, startling, and invisible. I was completely sucked into the worlds of these characters. It takes a master to make me forget Im holding a book. Well, I forgot that for more than 300 pages. Brilliant.

Percival Everett, author of The Trees

A powerful and fiercely unsentimental novel that blazes past all the well-worn pieties about love and loss and leaves them in ashes.

Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

Praise for Trance

National Book Award Finalist for Fiction

International IMPAC Dublin Award Finalist

A Los Angeles Times Book Review Favorite Book of the Year

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Novel of the Year

Sorrentino has something of Don DeLillos ear for American white noisefor the hiss and crackle that fills the countrys derelict spaces.

Tom Shone, The New York Times Book Review

Sorrentinos vision here is kaleidoscopic, eliding fluidly from in-dividual to individual, taking on a wide array of points of view.

David L. Ulin, Newsday

This sprawling work is so ambitious and irreverent that it doesnt fit easily into any genre... Full of descriptions sublime in their precision... Trance is a pleasure to readdelightful and often funny.

Carmela Ciuraru, Los Angeles Times

Trance doggedly dismantles the pedestal of celebrity and myth.

Theo Schell-Lambert,