Carole Maso

In the aftermath of her father's death, Caroline, a young American woman, returns to New York to attend to final arrangements, oversees the death of a best friend, and tests the limits of love and the power of art in the face of life's inevitabilities. By the author of Ghost Dance. Reprint.

The Art Lover

In a celebration of life and joy, a professor recalls the thirty-nine years of her life as she lies dying, revealing emotional and intellectual richness and variety, including the horrors of her family's experiences during World War II. Reprint. IP.

essays on language, longing, and moments of desire

Break every rule

Ghost Dance

Carole Maso's stunning, erotic fourth novel chronicles the dark, irresistible adventures of an American writer named Catherine who has come to France to live. Set into motion by a single act of abandonment-Catherine's lover of ten years has left her-she falls deeper and deeper into an irretrievable madness. With passionate abandon and detachment Catherine pursues her own destruction. Forcing the boundaries of identity and the limits of her eroticism, she enters a series of blinding sexual encounters with a poet, a fascist, a young Arlesian woman, a fireman, and three thieves. Eerily she splits herself in two so that she is both the one who watches and the one who is watched, creator and creation, author and character, as she observes herself from afar "And I would like to help her", the one who watches says, "but I can't". Finally she meets Lucien, the solitary, cynical, beautiful man with long hair who looks as though he has "stepped out of an unmade film by the dead Truffaut", and through this mysterious, doomed, bittersweet liaison Catherine makes one last attempt to halt her decline through the redemptive act of story-telling. She begins to invent the story of their lives, telling it to him half in English, half in French, joining their solitudes for a moment before losing forever her belief that the shapely, hopeful prospects of narrative make sense of expenence. "She notices how everything is given up or taken away" as she loses the power of the imagination or memory or the body to console, and finally of language to convey meaning. This mesmerizing drama of sex, betrayal, and dissolution with its shattering inevitable conclusion is played out against the dazzling backdrop of thebeautiful, indifferent Cote d'Azur in summer. Written in a dwindling lexicon with a simple, warped musicality, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is a dark, uncompromising, seductive work of art.

A Novel

The American Woman in the Chinese Hat

Aureole

The Passion of Frida Kahlo

Beauty Is Convulsive

Defiance

a novel

Mother & child

Intimate and erotic celebration of desire from one of America's most innovative and daring writers.

An Erotic Sequence

A series of prose poems and essays provides a biographical meditation on the life of Frida Kahlo, the acclaimed Mexican artist and wife of Diego Rivera.

Beauty is Convulsive

A literary mediation on life and death, being and non–being, and the intense mystery and beauty of existence between a mother and child. “Heartbreakingly perfect” (San Francisco Chronicle), Maso’s moving, dreamlike novel follows a mother and child as they roam through wondrous and increasingly dangerous psychic and physical terrain. A great wind comes, an ancient tree splits in half, and a bat, or possibly an angel, enters the house where the mother and child sleep, and in an instant a world of relentless change, of spectacular consequences, of submerged memory, and uncanny intimations is set into motion. What was once hidden is now in plain sight in all its splendor and terror as the mother and child are asked to bear enormous transformations and a terrible wisdom almost impossible to fathom. As the outside can no longer be separated from the inside, nor dream from reality, the mother and child continue, encountering along the way all kinds of characters and creatures as they move through a surreal world of grace and dread to the end. “The tough–mindedness, originality and wit of her perceptions are intoxicating.”—Publisher Weekly “By giving the conflicts in her life a fictional context, she tries to bring order and beauty—and some degree of understanding—to chaos.”—Library Journal “Fully coherent, moving and elegiac, a genuine consolation.” —The New York Times Book Review

Mother and Child

The novelist chronicles her pregnancy and birth in a poetic tribute to the joys, pain, terrors, and hopes associated with new motherhood. 10,000 first printing.

A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth

The Room Lit by Roses

Carole Maso's Aureole is a brilliant, fragmented, overtly sexual novel of an American woman coming to terms with her sexuality, her lesbianism and her erotic relationship to the world. Maso's early work like Ghost Dance were precise, sophisticated...

Language, Maso declares, is incarnate, and has been obscured by prevailing notions of "literature." Now is the time, Maso urges, for a kind of language revolution, in which women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, "make their own shapes and sounds.""--BOOK JACKET.

Carole Maso

About

Books

Join the club