Rise the Euphrates - Softcover

Carol Edgarian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0984381643 ISBN 13: 9780984381647

Publisher: Narrative Library, 2011

Synopsis

*A new edition of RISE THE EUPHRATES with an introduction by the author is now available on Amazon. Please search for Rise the Euphrates: 20th Anniversary Edition*

An international bestseller in hardcover and winner of the ANC Freedom Award, "Rise the Euphrates" is now available in this elegant paperback edition. A contemporary woman's coming of age story, the novel reaches back to 1915 Armenia, when Seta Loon's family is fractured in the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks. Two generations later, Seta, the novel's lyrical narrator, must alter her family's legacy. "The daughter assumes what is unfinished in her mother's life," Seta learns. Caught between the generations, between American and Armenian cultures in her Connecticut town, Seta confronts an even fiercer division, the one within herself. The wisdom she gains frees the next generation in Carol Edgarian's stunningly original and ground-breaking novel.

PRAISE FOR RISE THE EUPHRATES

"This is a book whose generosity of spirit, intelligence, humanity and finally ambition are what literature ought to be and rarely is today — daring, heartbreaking and affirmative, giving order and sense to our random lives."
—Washington Post Book World

“A stunning debut—a book that will doubtless haunt its readers as it beguiles them."
—The Miami Herald

"...Vivid, chilling...RISE THE EUPHRATES' richly drawn characters and the haunted voice of the narrator will long remain in readers' memories."
—Robert Stone

"How often do you get to read a book that captures you so entirely and deeply that it controls your days, measures them out and defines them by how long it will be before you can get to your next night's reading? RISE THE EUPHRATES is on of these rare treasures: a work of power, grace, beauty and exquisite tenderness. This book goes beyond the reading experience; it reminds you of your own hopes and terrors. RISE THE EUPHRATES will live for a long, long time in the manner of Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."
—Rick Bass

"A novel of extraordinary compassion, it's also a dead-on view of assimilation and the American experience."
—Phoenix Gazette

"The writing is so good it can raise the hairs on your neck."
—Elizabeth Berg, Mademoiselle

About this title

About the Author:

Carol Edgarian is an author, editor, and publisher. Her novels include Three Stages of Amazement and the best-selling Rise the Euphrates, hailed by the Washington Post as "a book whose generosity of spirit, intelligence, humanity, and finally ambition are what literature ought to be and rarely is today." Her articles and essays have appeared in many national magazines, and she coedited the popular collection drawn from great writers' diaries,The Writer's Life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame. In 2003, Edgarian and her husband, editor and writer Tom Jenks, founded Narrative Magazine (www.NarrativeMagazine.com), the leading digital source for storytelling--publishing more than three hundred artists each year--and Narrative in the Schools, a program to encourage reading and writing in schools across America. Edgarian lives in San Francisco with her husband and their three daughters. Learn more about Carol and her work at www.caroledgarian.com

From Kirkus Reviews:

Edgarian's tale of a displaced victim of the Armenian genocide and the impact of her experience on her daughter and granddaughter in America makes for a deeply affecting story, told with a confidence and lyricism that belie its author's status as a beginner. In 1915, nine-year-old Garod witnesses the deaths of her parents and brother as the Muslim Turks brutally murder a million Armenians, who they fear will otherwise fight with Russia against them. Orphaned, starved, and so traumatized that she has forgotten her own name, the girl christens herself Cafard, after the French word for melancholy, but is inadvertently renamed Casard at Ellis Island when she immigrates to America. There Garod/Casard immediately marries a fellow Armenian refugee, settles into an immigrant enclave in Memorial, Connecticut, and gives birth to a daughter of her own. Seventy years after her arrival in America, her favorite granddaughter, Seta Loon, tells how Casard fought with her growing daughter, beautiful, rebellious Araxie, who wanted only to shed her mother's terrible legacy, live a glamorous life, and see the world. Nevertheless, as Seta herself would eventually learn, ``the daughter assumes what is unfinished in her mother's life''; middle-aged Araxie finds herself rejecting her non-Armenian husband while fighting to keep her own elder daughter at her side. But Seta flees to California as soon as possible to escape Araxie's and Casard's pain. Will her grandmother's friends be happy for her, a calmer 33-year-old Seta wonders as she returns to Memorial pregnant and unmarried, now that she has used her foremothers' experience to create an independent existence? A highly accomplished first novel spanning three very different generations on two continents--and an unusually intelligent look at the American immigrant experience. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Narrative Library
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0984381643
• ISBN 13: 9780984381647
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 450