State of Paradise (Signed First Edition)

Van Den Berg, Laura

ISBN 10: 037461220X / ISBN 13: 9780374612207

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2024

About this Item

New York, FSG, 2024. First edition. First printing (with full number line including 1). Hardbound. Very Fine in a very fine jacket. A pristine unread copy. Publisher's price intact on front jacket flap ($27.00). SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page (name only). Comes with archival-quality mylar jacket protector. Smoke-free. A novel.

Seller Inventory # Signed-Fiction-Van Den Berg

Bibliographic Details

• Title: State of Paradise (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037461220X
• ISBN 13: 9780374612207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2024. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Named a Best Book of 2024 by Vanity Fair, NPR, ELLE, and Kirkus. Longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

"A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems." ―Mona Awad, author of Rouge

"At once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida's psychogeography and a creepy story about ghosts, missing people, cults, and technology. Don't miss it." ―Gabino Iglesias, NPR

A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida’s underbelly from the celebrated Laura van den Berg

It’s another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother’s home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she’s contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button.

Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.

About the Author

Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, The Isle of Youth, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one the ten best fiction books of 2020 by TIME, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and named a best book of 2018 by more than a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.