HUNGRY GHOST THEATER: A NOVEL by Sarah Stone
ISBN: 978-0-9988014-5-2
Binding: Trade paper
Pages: 316
Publication date: Oct. 10, 2018
Finalist for the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, 2018.
A loving, dysfunctional half-Jewish family of performers, scientists, and activists long to wake up the world but must first rescue each other from their own addictions and compulsions, with a little help (and sometimes hindrance) from the occasional ghost or god.
Praise for Hungry Ghost Theater
With her laser intelligence and gorgeous prose style, Sarah Stone has written a thrilling hybrid of a novel about the intricacies of family life and the inevitable handing down from one generation to the next of our deepest passions and pathologies. Set around the world—and in the next one—this book is both marvelously inventive and deeply humane. I loved it.
—Ann Packer, author of The Children’s Crusade
Sarah Stone traces out the quirky, fateful dramas of one family, while having the visionary originality to take the longest possible view of human action. I found this an unforgettable book, astute, vivid, and stubbornly ambitious in its scope. —Joan Silber, author of Improvement
About the author
Sarah Stone ’s novel The True Sources of the Nile (Doubleday/Anchor) has been taught in courses on literature, ethics, and the rhetoric of human rights. It was a BookSense 76 selection and has been translated into German and Dutch. She’s the co-author, with her spouse and writing partner Ron Nyren, of the textbook Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Ploughshares; StoryQuarterly; The Believer; The Millions; The Writer’s Chronicle; and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, among other places. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Praise for Sarah Stone's earlier work
“This stunning first novel… is distinctive enough to be in a class of its own. Stone...brings an authentic voice to this novel of life-and-death issues.
—Library Journal
Stone’s triumph is that she enriches her story with grand ideas that funnel into just one: What is most important in this life?”
—USA Today
“... ambitious and thoroughly absorbing first novel... Stone’s ability to create compelling characters is such that each time someone lies, the reader is jolted... full of engaging parallels and paradoxes, the novel is an intricate study of rationality and its mirror image, rationalization… an intricate study of family and tribal loyalty...”
—Publishers Weekly
Course adoptions
Hungry Ghost Theater is perfect for course adoptions and may be used in a number of classes, including literature seminars, creative writing workshops, gender studies, and many other interdisciplinary courses. Supplemental educational materials prepared by WTAW Director of Studies Michael Collins are available to those who adopt our books. Professors may also receive a complimentary exam copy. Please contact us directly.