While her father and best friend are dying, a young American woman tries to find the limits of love and the power of art in the face of the inevitable.While her father and best friend are dying, a young American woman tries to find the limits of love and the power of art in the face of the inevitable.What is the power of art in the face of death? In The Art Lover Carole Maso has created an elegant and moving narrative about a woman experiencing (and reliving) the most painful transitions of her life. Caroline, the novel's protagonist, returns to New York after the death of her fatherostensibly to wrap things up and take care of necessary "business"where her memory and imagination conspire to lay before her all her griefs and joys in a rebellious progression. In different voices, employing a collage-like fragmentation, Maso gently unfolds The Art Lover in much the same way the fragile and prehistoric fiddlehead fern unfolds...

From one of our most daring writers comes this intimate and seductive book: a working journal of pregnancy that was both a Lambda Literary Awards finalist and a Village Voice pick for Best Books of 2000. Maso chronicles with great tenderness and awe the months of her pregnancy, from its charmed conception through the auspicious arrival of Rose.

Beauty is Convulsive is a biographical meditation on one of the twentieth century's most compelling and famous artists, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). At the age of nineteen, Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits. In 1928, at twenty-one, she joined the Communist Party and came to know Diego Rivera. The forty-one-year-old Rivera, Mexico's most famous painter, was impressed by the force of Kahlo's personality and by the authenticity of her art, and the two soon married. Though they were devoted to each other, intermittent affairs on both sides, Frida's grief over her inability to bear a child, and her frequent illnesses made the marriage tumultuous. This prose poem is typical Maso-vigorous, daring, always original. She brings together parts of Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries with language that is often as erotic and colorful as Kahlo's paintings. "Maso's precise and poetic prose… brims with emotion, imagination, intelligence, and beauty." — Review of Contemporary Fiction "… a supple, discerning, and haunting prose poem, a biographical meditation that elegantly charts Kahlo’s epic resiliency, artistic daring, unrelenting suffering, soul-saving 'sense of the ridiculous,' and glorious defiance. Maso’s spare yet lyric tribute, a genuine communion, is a welcome antidote to the mawkishness and sensationalism that is starting to blur our appreciation for Kahlo’s pioneering art and incandescent spirit." — Booklist

A mediation on life and death, being and non-being, and the intense mystery and beauty of existence, Maso's new novel follows a mother and child as they roam through wondrous and increasingly dangerous psychic and physical terrain A great wind comes, an ancient tree splits in half and a bat, or is it an angel, enters the house where the mother and child sleep, and in an instant a world of relentless change, of spectacular consequences, of submerged memory, and uncanny intimations is set into motion.It is as if a veil has lifted, and what was once hidden is now in plain sight in all its splendor and terror as the mother and child are asked to bear enormous transformations and a terrible wisdom almost impossible to fathom. As the outside can no longer be separated from the inside, nor dream from reality, the mother and child continue, encountering along the way all kinds of characters and creatures as they move through a surreal world of grace and dread to the end.The bond...