Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
A New York Times Critics’ Best Books of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A NYLON Best Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Nonfiction Book of the Year • An Entrophy Magazine Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year • A Brooklyn Rail Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year • A Baltimore Beat Best Book of the Year
A Paris Review Staff Pick • A Chicago Tribune Exciting Book for 2017 • A Rolling Stone Culture Index Reccomendation • A Buzzfeed Most Exciting Book for 2017 • A The Millions Great 2017 Book Preview Pick • A Huffington Post 2017 Preview Pick • A NYLON Best 10 Books of the Month • A Lit Hub 15 Books to Read This Month A Poets &amp; Writers New and Noteworth Selection • A PW Top 10 Spring Pick in Essays &amp; Literary Criticism• An Emma Straub Reccomendation on PBS
“One of the themes of ‘Sunshine State,’ Sarah Gerard’s striking book of essays, is how Florida can unmoor you and make you reach for shoddy, off-the-shelf solutions to your psychic unease…. The first essay is a knockout, a lurid red heart wrapped in barbed wire.... This essay draws blood.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times
"Unflinchingly candid memoir bolstered by thoughtfully researched history…. A nuanced and subtly intimate mosaic… her writing, lucid yet atmospheric, takes on a timeless ebb and flow.” — Jason Heller, NPR.org
"Stunning." — Rolling Stone
“These large-hearted, meticulous essays offer an uncanny x-ray of our national psyche... showing us both the grand beauty of our American dreams and the heartbreaking devastation they wreak.” — Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
Sarah Gerard follows her breakout novel, Binary Star, with the dynamic essay collection Sunshine State, which explores Florida as a microcosm of the most pressing economic and environmental perils haunting our society.
In the collection’s title essay, Gerard volunteers at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, a world renowned bird refuge. There she meets its founder, who once modeled with a pelican on his arm for a Dewar’s Scotch campaign but has since declined into a pit of fraud and madness. He becomes our embezzling protagonist whose tales about the birds he “rescues” never quite add up. Gerard’s personal stories are no less eerie or poignant: An essay that begins as a look at Gerard’s first relationship becomes a heart-wrenching exploration of acquaintance rape and consent. An account of intimate female friendship pivots midway through, morphing into a meditation on jealousy and class.
With the personal insight of The Empathy Exams, the societal exposal of Nickel and Dimed, and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel Binary Star, Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.

Sunshine State: Essays

Gerard, Sarah

Reference

Harper-perennial

A Glamour Best Book of 2020 • A Bustle Best Books of 2020 • Winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award • An Entertainment Weekly 30 Hottest Book of the Summer • A Refinery29 25 Book You’ll Want To Read This Summer Selection • A Chicago Review of Books 10 Must-Read Books of the Month • A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Shondaland 15 Hot Books for Summer 
One of today’s most provocative literary writers—the author of the critically-acclaimed Sunshine State and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Binary Star—captures the confused state of modern romance and the egos that inflate it in a dark comedy about a woman's search for acceptance, identity, and financial security in the rise of Trump. 
Nina is a struggling writer, a college drop-out, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it. 
From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable “relationship” in his life; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker living at home with his parents, with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus. 
Nina’s quest for fulfillment is at once darkly comedic, acerbically acute, and painfully human—a scathing critique of contemporary society, and a tender examination of our anguished yearning for connection in an era defined by detachment.

True Love: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

A Glamour Best Book of 2020&nbsp;*&nbsp;A Bustle Best Books of 2020&nbsp;*&nbsp;Winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award&nbsp;*&nbsp;An Entertainment Weekly 30 Hottest Book of the Summer * A Refinery29&nbsp;25 Book You'll Want To Read This Summer Selection&nbsp;* A Chicago Review of Books 10 Must-Read Books of the Month&nbsp;* A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year&nbsp;* A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year&nbsp;* A Shondaland 15 Hot Books for Summer One of today's most provocative literary writers--the author of the critically-acclaimed&nbsp;Sunshine State&nbsp;and&nbsp;the Los Angeles Times&nbsp;First Fiction Award finalist&nbsp;Binary Star--captures the confused state of modern romance and the egos that inflate it in a&nbsp;dark comedy about a woman's search for acceptance, identity, and financial security in the rise of Trump. Nina is a struggling writer, a college drop-out, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it. From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable "relationship" in his life; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker living at home with his parents, with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus. Nina's quest for fulfillment is at once darkly comedic, acerbically acute, and painfully human--a scathing critique of contemporary society, and a tender examination of our anguished yearning for connection in an era defined by detachment.

Harper

Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable

Parenting & Relationships

Zando

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they've found a direction. Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success. "A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way." --Jenny Offill "I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard's brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy,devastated, loving all of it." --Kate Zambreno "Two lost souls hurtle through a long dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard's young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity--ideological, mental, physical--comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed. Binary Star is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is 'I want to look at the sky and understand.'" --Justin Taylor "By now I've read Binary Star twice, and I've become so entwined with it that I'm reluctant to talk about the subject at length. Let me just say that I've never read anything like it." --Harry Mathews "Allegorized by the phenomena of binary stars, Sarah Gerard's first novel confronts the symptoms of modern living with beauty and courage." --Simon Van Booy Sarah Gerard's work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine's "The Cut," Paris Review Daily, Slice Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and other journals. She is the author of the chapbook Things I Told My Mother and a graduate of The New School's MFA program for fiction.

Binary Star

United States

Two Dollar Radio

The Butter House

Literary

Conium Press

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