Author Description

Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. In her masterful second book, Anne Germanacos gets right down to the elemental: the single line. TRIBUTE is a work of prose--novel, essay, experiment in narrative? --created from distinct lines, a work of continual shape-shift and exhilarating motion. TRIBUTE chronicles the daily life of a woman whose mother is dying and who begins to see a psychoanalyst, a woman who lives among lovers, sisters, and children, across continents and their conflicts (New York, San Francisco, Crete, Cyprus, Israel/Palestine). The book that results offers us both her story--forcefully sensual, vibrantly lived--and, through its bold form, her complex relationship to story. Germanacos's restless relationship to form is born of that most essential restlessness: desire. In TRIBUTE she documents desire's manifold incarnations, the body's and the mind's; she pays beautiful tribute to the force of desire and to those who have been bold enough to try to comprehend it--gentle echoes remind us of H.D. and her Freud. In the tradition of Clarice Lispector, David Markson, and Marguerite Duras, TRIBUTE takes us deep into the borderlands where fiction and nonfiction meet. The first book in Rescue Press's new series of innovative prose, this is a work of profound ambition and rare urgency. In a form all its own, navigating aphorism, journal, poetry, and novel, Anne Germanacos sounds out the profound territory of eros and grief, and their often unexplored interdependence. The beauty and agony of a mother's slow death, a daughter's striving body and perambulating mind: the sprawl of TRIBUTE contains both, and admirably explores stations of rage, stasis, melancholy, observation, and desire.--Maggie Nelson Anne Germanacos's moving TRIBUTE is at once arrestingly precise, deeply mysterious, and wholly unexpected. Every sentence is written with the acuity and emotional complexity of a poem, and in the charged spaces in between these sentences, the inexpressible r