Praise for Sheri Joseph’s Stray

Winner of Grub Street’s first annual Fiction Book Prize 

“Joseph tells an intense story about an unconventional love triangle… a swiftly moving [and] compelling tale of reconciliation and redemption as the lovers are forced to face their flawed perceptions head-on.” – Booklist

“…a unique and enticing look at a love triangle…seductive and convincing.” – Pages Magazine

 

“It’s a testament to Joseph’s nuanced writing and sensitive insight that she can create such a fragile but convincing triangle and evoke such empathy from the reader…Stray is the best story of a mixed gender three-person love affair since Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World.” – Ken Furtado, Echo Magazine

 

“[Stray] is a telling book that reveals how complex the construction of appearance and identity can be in contemporary society…Joseph has a good insight into the smaller moments of close relationships, the everyday conversations between lovers that speak more about the two people involved.” – Lexington Herald-Leader

 

“Joseph’s potent tale of sexual deception and emotional redemption is a seductive stew of love story and murder mystery about three fundamentally fine, and gratifyingly complex, people.”  – Richard LaBonte, San Francisco Bay Guardian

 

“With great skill and psychological insight, Sheri Joseph has crafted a highly compelling mystery about the duplicitous nature of what we call love: its tender cruelties and its potential for placing us all in mortal danger.”  – Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes and The Whole World Over

 

“Sheri Joseph’s three characters are as real as anybody I know, caught up in the rapturous human business of hope and beguilement and self-deception. Stray is mesmerizing. Sheri Joseph has written a seductive, frightening book.”  – Jennifer Haigh, author of Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble

 

“In the intricately plotted Stray, Sheri Joseph spins a web of such psychological acuity that I could never decide which of her three beguiling characters to sympathize with next. The result is a novel of considerable moral complexity and marvelous suspense.”

– Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture and Banishing Verona

 

 Public Appearances

2/16-18/2007  Dahlonega Literary Festival   Dahlonega, GA   
2/22/07  Outwrite Books  8pm  Atlanta, GA   
2/28-3/3/2007  AWP Conference   Atlanta, GA   (signing at the book fair)
3/14/07  Happy Ending Reading Series  7:30pm  New York, NY

4/5/07  GSU (Georgia State Univ) Troy Moore Library  7:30pm   Atlanta, GA     
4/27/07  A Different Light Bookstore  7pm  San Francisco, CA   
4/28/07  Bookshop West Portal  7pm  San Francisco, CA  (with Michelle Richmond)

5/3/07   Grub Street Prize celebration, TBA, Boston, MA

5/4-5/6/07  Muse and the Marketplace  Boston, MA

Did anyone else see Charlie LeDuff on the Colbert Report the other night?  He was promoting his new book, US Guys.  The interview was…strange.  I love Colbert, and he is quick.  Rarely does he not know what to do with a guest.  It wasn’t that LeDuff undermined Colbert, but there were several non-sequiturs which left him simply looking at LeDuff.  Colbert was trying to extract what you would think would be important to LeDuff–what is your new book about?  Given that it’s a non-fiction text there should be some sort of point.  But I’m not sure there is.  It is about the American male.  It is about what divorce has done to boys.  It is about gay rodeos.  It is about bowels.  It is about what is going on, which is a convenient way of stating anything.  Amazon calls him an heir to Kerouac and Thompson, setting the bar a bit high, perhaps.  The New York Times (where LeDuff is a reporter) Sunday book review was not so favorable; Allison Glock writes,

LeDuff wants these invisible men to be seen, so long as they don’t eclipse him. As both narrator and subject he is chippy and hostile. Needy and belligerent. At home in obscenity. An erection in print. Fair enough — if this were a memoir. (“Let Us Now Praise Famous Me!”)

But “US Guys” is meant to be an examination of the mind of American men. And if that is the case, these points have been made before (by Studs Terkel, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Ehrenreich and Upton Sinclair among many others), better and with less attention to the writer’s bowels.

In the end, we only learn a whole lot about the true and twisted mind of one American man. Who happens to believe he’s Everyman. And if that’s the case, then LeDuff help us.

I found it fitting that Glock mentions Johnny Depp in the first paragraph of her review.  LeDuff really did bring to mind Depp when he was on the Colbert Report.  I don’t know–I loved him and hated him at the same time.  He was one of those so brazenly self-absorbed people that somehow appears sexy for his strong (but vague) passion and convictions (and good hair). Maybe what we are seeing are skewed expectations in terms of genre–in terms of non-fiction / gonzo journalism, when does it become memoir?…A bunch of stuff you did, thematically linked or linked by a personal quest, rather than a true investigative task?  Is it me or is the non-fiction market flooded with this type of stuff?  It makes me want to take a long road trip, stop at every ________ on the way, then write a book about it.