Fernanda Eberstadt Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Fernanda Eberstadt Biography

Fernanda Eberstadt was born in New York City on November 10, 1960. Her maternal grandfather was the poet Ogden Nash. She is the daughter of the photographer and psychotherapist Frederick Eberstadt, who lives in New York City. Her mother was Isabel Nash Eberstadt, a writer, fashion figure, and patroness of the arts, who published two novels, appeared in Andy Warhol's Screen Tests and in Robert Wilson's opera Edison.

As a teenager, Eberstadt worked backstage at Balanchine's New York City Ballet, at Andy Warhol's Factory, and for Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum.

She was one of the first women to be accepted at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which she graduated with a Double First Class Honors degree in English Language and Literature in 1982.

In the 1980s, she worked as a journalist and critic in New York City, writing essays about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and the Hebrew Bible for magazines such as Commentary, The New Criterion, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.

In 1985, her first novel, Low Tide, was published. This told the story of Jezebel, daughter of an English art dealer and a mad Louisiana heiress, and her fatal love affair with two young brothers.

Eberstadt's book-length article on Sicily, the novelist Lampedusa, and the restoration of old palaces in Palermo appeared in The New Yorker. Since the early 1990s, Eberstadt has lived mostly in Europe. She spent a year and a half in Istanbul, writing about the city for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.

In 1993, she married the British writer Alastair Bruton.

In 1998, Eberstadt and her family moved to the French Mediterranean Pyrenees, where they lived for six years in a house on a vineyard outside Perpignan, while Bruton researched a book about the decline of Christianity in contemporary Western Europe.

Eberstadt's experiences in Perpignan's Gypsy community led to her first non-fiction book, Little Money Street, a portrait of her friendship with a family of French Gypsy musicians.

Since 2009, she has been living between France and London.

Her books have been translated into eight languages.



Bibiliography:

• Low Tide (1985): The story of Jezebel, daughter of an English art-dealer and a mad Louisiana heiress, and her fatal love-affair with two young brothers. It takes place in New York, Oxford, and Mexico.
• Isaac and His Devils (1991): Set in rural New Hampshire, the novel's hero is Isaac Hooker, a half-deaf, half-blind, hugely fat and ambitious boy-genius and his struggle to fulfill his parents' blighted dreams.
• When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth (1997): A portrait of the New York art world in the eighties.
• The Furies (2003): Set in 1990s Manhattan.
• Rat (2010)

Fernanda Eberstadt's website

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