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A Novel
by Laura van den Berg
A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida's underbelly from the celebrated Laura van den Berg
Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using Mind's Eye, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by Electra, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it's not just the ominous cats, her mother's burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern―something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets.
During a violent rainstorm, the writer's sister goes missing for several days. When she returns, sprawled on their mother's lawn and speaking of another dimension, the writer is forced to investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between Electra, the famous author, and reality itself.
A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Berg's State of Paradise is an interlocking and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.
"Readers who aren't sure how a science fiction plot will meld with writing that sometimes reads almost like memoir needn't worry. This is van den Berg, whose Lynchian sensibility and cool yet impassioned eye is somehow the perfect choice to examine what might be America's most eccentric state and the ways that 'we are called back to the things we most want to flee' ... If speculative autofiction wasn't a thing, it is now; van den Berg is a pioneer." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Entrancing ... Van den Berg is a master at nudging the familiar world slightly off its axis ... This off-kilter story is hard to forget." ―Publishers Weekly
"[A] strange, enthralling novel." ―Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle
"Of her now seven books of fiction, this one is arguably her funniest, most playful, most innovative, and possibly my favorite ... The book becomes not only an evocation of that year when so many of us stopped our lives, but also of dreams personal and universal, of pilgrimages, apocalypses, traumas, and tales." ―Deb Olin Unferth, Bomb
"Pitch perfect and exquisitely composed. Laura van den Berg is a gifted and audacious writer and she's written a novel of weight, power and beauty. I couldn't put it down." ―Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown
"A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems. With sharp, gripping prose, Laura van den Berg fearlessly conjures the fundamental wildness of being alive in the world as we know it, and the pull of the deeper wildness within." ―Mona Awad, author of Rouge
"State of Paradise chronicles strange pandemic days, the rise of mindless electronic escape, and grief's otherworldly whims in a wholly original and epically engaging novel from a master of episodic oddity. I'll follow Laura van den Berg wherever she wants to take me, even Florida." ―Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
This information about State of Paradise was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,The Isle of Youth, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one the ten best fiction books of 2020 by TIME, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and named a best book of 2018 by more than a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
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