Finding almost no trace of her, Green instead invents, appropriates and transforms artifacts. This is simply fascinating and gorgeously written, gorgeously assembled.” -Roxane GayĪrtist and writer Karen Green’s Frail Sister originated in her search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes.
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From the beginning to the end of the book, we bear witness to a life, too-short but fully-lived. She lives in Northern California and New York City.“What a beautiful, strange book-found objects and fictional prose brought together to tell the real and imagined story of Constance Gale, through letters to her sister, letters from young men at war. Her first book Bough Down earned numerous accolades and a devoted readership. KAREN GREEN is an artist and writer whose inventive, hybrid image-text works narrate the intimate spaces of human experience. Nimble, unnerving and darkly funny, Frail Sister examines the thin membrane between resiliency and fragility, the love of family and its betrayals, bringing a forgotten life into focus. In this exquisitely woven, epistolary and visual fiction, Green imagines for her aunt a childhood in which she is bold, reckless, perspicacious, mischievous an adolescence ripe with desire and scarred by violation and loss and an adulthood in which she strives to sing above the din. Then she constructs an elliptical, arresting arrangement of these fragments to pursue a new inquiry: what becomes of a woman whose talent, ambition, and appetite defy what the world expects of her? How does she disappear? Finding almost no trace of her aunt, Green instead invents, appropriates and alters artifacts. After the war, she returns to an unsparing life in New York City in which the violence persists and her ghosts multiply.Īrtist and writer Karen Green’s second book originated in her search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes. Letters to and from Constance expose not only the quotidian reality of war but also the ubiquitous brutality it throws into relief. Men-some kind, some nefarious, some an ineluctable cocktail-write to Constance, smitten by her stage persona. and touring a ravaged Italy during World War II. As a teenager, she escapes the confines of her impoverished life by joining the U.S.O. As a child, Constance Gale is put to work with her sister, performing as musical prodigies during the Great Depression.
#ROXANE GAY FAMILY PHOTO ARCHIVE#
POINT REYES BOOKS, Point Reyes, California: Saturday, Octofrom 4-6 p.m.ĪRTBOOK HAUSER & WIRTH, Los Angeles, California: Saturday, Octofrom 4-6 p.m.ĪEON BOOKSTORE, New York City: Thursday, October 25, 2018, from 6-8 p.m.Ī fictional archive of altered photos, letters, collages and drawings, Frail Sister is a rescued history of a missing woman’s life. Her ear is as keen as her eye is dazzling. JONATHAN FRANZEN: Karen Green smashes the boundaries between the visual and the written, the found and the invented, the comic and the tragic between uncompromising art and pure fun. Moving, sly and skillful, a portrait of woman’s life in the embodied history of its materials.
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JANET FITCH: Glorious, a haunting prism of art and artifact, Frail Sister builds its power as a mystery does, with clues and secrets, the story inseparable from the form.
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This is a masterwork creating its own terms for existence-every page a marvelous and terrifying journey. If there must be a question at the center of every breath, Frail Sister asks what it is to “faint upwards” or “float and fall” in the same moment. Sisters in life and the men who admire, cajole or destroy them stand in for every woman who has felt missing, gone missing, found dead. Here image is formed by epistolary text which is informed by the unformed facts of actual lives reformed by fiction. CLAUDIA RANKINE: Frail Sister is a singular achievement that defies genre naming.