Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story - Brossura

Stern, Erica

Brossura

ISBN 13: 9798985008937

Casa editrice: Barrelhouse Inc., 2025

Riassunto

LitHub Notable Small Press Book of 2025

Chicago Review of Books Best Debuts of 2025 Selection

Jewish Women's Archive Book Club Pick

"If Stern's book sounds like nothing you've ever encountered before, that's likely because it is . . . Stern's story is a welcome and necessary contribution to the conversation around birth at a time when the dangers of bearing children feel especially pressing . . . . [A] book that holds the holiness and the dangers of childbirth in tension, making a strong case that everyone to whom birth is relevant-which is to say, everyone-should do the same."

-Corinne Cordasco-Pak, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Stern performs literary alchemy. She creates a hybrid form-part memoir, part ghost story, part research, part critique-that holds what conventional narrative cannot. The book itself becomes a frontier, an experimental space where multiple genres coexist to capture a maternal experience that exceeds any single mode of telling . . . .In a literary landscape rich with motherhood narratives, Stern's work stands apart-raw, intellectually rigorous, and formally inventive."

-Rebecca Powell, Zona Motel

As she prepared to give birth to her first child, Erica Stern envisioned the idyllic experience promised by prenatal classes and diaper commercials. But when unexpected complications arose during labor, she found herself at the threshold of life and death, a liminal space that connected her to generations of mothers before her.

From the chaos of the delivery room, Frontier opens into a parallel narrative: a Wild West ghost story. There, a mother who didn't survive the ordeal of childbirth roams her old homestead, tethered to the family she left behind. In this otherworldly hybrid memoir, Stern careens between this haunted past and the present horror of the hospital as she waits for her own son to wake up in the NICU.

Seamlessly blending memoir, fiction, and research into the fraught history of birth-from midwives to Victorian-era sedation through the Natural Childbirth Movement and modern L&D suites-Frontier lays bare visceral truths that are too often glossed over, and offers an incisive look at the momentous and terrifying transformations of motherhood.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Erica Stern's work has been published in The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received support for her writing from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A New Orleans native, she lives with her family in Evanston, Illinois.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Barrelhouse Inc.
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 13: 9798985008937
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 208
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile