The Art Of… with Maud Casey and Stacey D’Erasmo

By Housing Works Bookstore & Cafe

Jan 11  |  Community

Our first event of 2018 is a great one! Join us to celebrate the launch of The Art of Mystery, the fourteenth volume in the much-loved Art of series from Graywolf Press, with the author Maud Casey and Stacey D’Erasmo (The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between). They’ll explore the ways mystery and intimacy can be created in fiction as they explore character, image, structure, and the texts that they return to in their own writing practices.

About The Art of Mystery:

The fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction. Mystery is not often discussed—apart from the genre—because, as Maud Casey notes, “It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance.” Casey reaches beyond the usual tool kit of fictional elements to ask the question: Where does mystery reside in a work of fiction? She takes us into the Land of Un—a space of uncertainty and unknowing— to find out and looks at the variety of ways mystery is created through character, image, structure, and haunted texts, including the novels of Shirley Jackson, Paul Yoon, J. M. Coetzee, and others. Casey’s wide-ranging exploration encompasses spirit photography, the radical nature of empathy, and contradictory characters, as she searches for questions rather than answers. The Art of Mystery is a striking and vibrant addition to the much loved Art ofseries.

About The Art of Intimacy:

What is the nature of intimacy, of what happens in the space between us? And how do we, as writers, catch or reflect it on the page?” Stacey D’Erasmo’s insightful and illuminating study examines the craft and the contradictions of creating relationships not only between two lovers, but also between friends, family members, acquaintances, and enemies in fiction. She argues for a more honest, more complex portrait of the true nature of the connections and missed connections among characters and, fascinatingly, between the writer and the reader. D’Erasmo takes us deep into the structure and grammar of these intimacies as they have been portrayed by such writers as Didion, Morrison, Lawrence, Woolf, and Maxwell, and also by visual artists and filmmakers. She asks whether writing about intimacy is like staring straight into the sun, but it is her own brilliance that dazzles in this piercing and original book.