News & Media
Hungry Ghost Theater was one of the five nominees for fiction for the 38th Annual Northern California Book Awards, presented and sponsored by Northern California Book Reviewers, Poetry Flash, PEN West, Mechanics' Institute Library, Women's National Book Association-SF Chapter, San Francisco Public Library, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, and Readers Bookstore at the Main. The other fiction nominees were The Incendiaries, R.O. Kwon, Riverhead Books; The Winter Soldier, Daniel Mason, Little, Brown and Company (winner); There There, Tommy Orange, Alfred A. Knopf; Winter Kept Us Warm, Anne Raeff, Counterpoint. More information about the awards at Poetry Flash.
October Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)
“Hungry Ghost Theater by Sarah Stone: Siblings Robert and Julia Zamarin want to reveal the dangers of the world with their small political theater company while their neuroscientist sister Eva attempts to find the biological roots of empathy. While contending with fraught family dynamics, the novel touches on themes like art, free will, addiction, desire, and loss. Joan Silber writes she ‘found this an unforgettable book, astute, vivid, and stubbornly ambitious in its scope.’” (Carolyn)
21 Books You Should Read This October (Lit Hub)
“Sarah Stone’s Hungry Ghost Theater is an astonishing mosaic of fiction, theater, lyrical text and performance, tracing one family through many generations and permutations. It’s a rare look at the inner workings of a theater company devoted to political material, involving siblings Robert and Julia, as well as an exploration of the roots of empathy, undertaken by their sister Eva, a neuroscientist. Reading it leaves the aftertaste of a powerful performance: ‘Though we’d worked all summer for one ephemeral moment, I was content.’” (Jane Ciabattari, Lit Hub columnist)
After two years as a Jewish Studio Project Fellow, in a cohort of artists, teachers, rabbis, healers, and activists, I’m now certified as a Jewish Studio Project Facilitator (more about the Jewish Studio Project mission and programs here.)
In 2020, I was fortunate to become a LABA East Bay Fellow. LABA is a Jewish house of study and culture laboratory that uses classic Jewish texts to inspire the creation of art, dialogue, and study. The theme for our year was humor, which we explored through writings from the Torah, Talmud, Mishnah, and Zohar alongside contemporary texts.
Selected Interviews
First Draft/Aspen Public Radio, Mitzi Rapkin, host
A behind-the-scenes look at Hungry Ghost Theater: a conversation about the writing process, the book’s structure and nature, mental illness, addiction, dark humor, family, and learning to deal with rejection. Listen to the show here.
Facts That Turn Out to Be Fiction: Ann Cummins and Sarah Stone on Writing, Landscape, and Family (The Millions)
After working as an aide in a psychiatric facility, and because of my family history, I’m interested in the question of how much is biological and when and how we make certain decisions that affect who we become…I sometimes think that writing fiction is part of how we both face and avoid external conflict, and even how we face and also avoid internal conflict. More >
An interview with Sarah Stone by Ron Nyren, WTAW Press: 2018 Interviews
Everything my mother made turned into a collage, assemblage, or installation, and I’ve inherited that sensibility from her. Hungry Ghost Theater is a mix of invented personal reality, real political context, and various mythologies, told in different voices and modes. The book does have a throughline moving underneath all the stories in the book, making an arc from beginning to end, but my experience of life is that it’s quite surreal: connected in improbable ways and disconnected in others. Some of the most fantastic moments are based at least a little on the tangible details of life. I’m very interested in the reality/fantasy border: did that really happen, or is it the character’s imagining or delusion? More >
Interview with Sarah Stone and Nancy Au (Entropy)
…When I knew Hungry Ghost Theater was a book, the plays were clearly part of it. Not simply plays written by the characters but the characters’ lives seen as plays in two of the sections: their lives literally become theater. More >
Interview with Kenneth Caldwell
“The theater gives us a chance to sit together in the dark, to collectively help the actors imagine a new reality. Often a totally improbable one! Some of the playwrights I love most (Mary Zimmerman, Wole Soyinka, Shakespeare), allow themselves great freedoms in time and space and in emotional logic. Hungry Ghost Theater has a couple of plays, which take place, respectively, in an assisted living community and in six different hells… And just about all of the characters in the novel, actors or not, are constantly performing.” More >
Selected Reviews
Review: Hungry Ghost Theater (San Francisco Chronicle)
“Prepare to be seduced straightaway by the sensuous beauty and penetrating wisdom of Sarah Stone’s second novel, “Hungry Ghost Theater” — starring the gifted, tormented, half-Jewish Zamarin family, 1993 through 2005…With calm control, Stone spirits us deeply into not just one but an array of worlds, from psychiatric social work to biology and (never least) theater, which may stand both for itself and for the cosmic overview…Set in our Bay Area, in Zanzibar, Seoul and later in what another reviewer calls “a series of Tibetan and Sumerian hells,” “Hungry Ghost’s” too-real souls may linger to gently haunt: their fierce particulars accruing to reveal, by book’s end, a lustrous vision.”
Review: Hungry Ghost Theater (American Library Association’s Booklist)
“Two sets of siblings from two generations form the nexus of Stone’s tantalizing exploration of the concepts of predestination versus free will and the unresolved questions that pulse through a family beset by shocking tragedies….Through interconnected stories that travel in time back to Chicago in the mid–1970s to the Santa Cruz mountains in the early 2000s, with stops in Zanzibar and Korea along the way, Stone’s ingenious deconstruction of family life is a shrewd, evocative, and arresting portrait…”
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (Library Journal)
“This stunning first novel, set in contemporary Africa, begs to be compared to Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible... yet is distinctive enough to be in a class of its own…This is much more than a political treatise: it is a story of sexual obsession and how we merge family values and relationships with career and humanitarian goals. Stone...brings an authentic voice to this novel of life-and-death issues.”
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (O, The Oprah Magazine)
“It is often assumed among the readers of novels that "political" or "global" kinds of stories are written by men, for men, and "domestic" or "relationship" stories are written by women, for women. This has never been entirely true, and now a first novel by a woman has arrived set in Burundi, involving a great sexual passion and love affair. At the root of this affair is an enduring politics – a politics of Africa, full of murder, history, and vengeance, a fire fueling the love and a disease destroying it as well…The True Sources of the Nile is a complex novel, clarified by a confident and wonderfully readable language. It's full of energy and place and fact, a romance, a tragedy, and a vital history lesson all in one.”
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (The New York Times)
“Sarah Stone’s fine first novel is about a love affair between Anne Copeland, a 37-year-old Californian doing human rights work in central Africa and Jean-Pierre Bukimana, a highly placed Burundian official…Things are not what they appear to be either in Anne’s family situation in America or in Jean-Pierre’s past in Burundi. Their lives are locked into circumstance, even when love seems strongest and most free.”
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (Miami Herald)
Shades of Graham Greene, this first novel is both verdant and ominous...although The True Sources of the Nile is concerned with the greater issues of passion and unimpeded violence, it is also a meditation on truth…full of engaging parallels and paradoxes… It's a novel with something for everyone, a sexy story set against questions of family and tribal loyalty and an almost palpable sense of contemporary Africa with its reddish scent of the dust, the mango and papaya tropical smells, a haunting sense of human tension and of growing things and of languorous obstinate decay.”
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (BookPage)
“A ghastly scene in Sarah Stone’s fascinating first novel, The True Sources of the Nile, starkly illustrates the saying that one death is a tragedy and one million are a statistic... Stone keeps all of these plots and subplots remarkably in focus... Stone’s style is clear and unadorned, but interspersed with descriptive gems... Most people will never find themselves in the center of genocide, but Stone makes us feel the horror of it, even in the midst of the everyday.”
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (Publisher’s Weekly)
“[An] ambitious and thoroughly absorbing first novel...Stone’s ability to create compelling characters is such that each time someone lies, the reader is jolted...the novel is an intricate study of rationality and its mirror image, rationalization…”
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (Newsday)
“Stone conveys Burundi’s otherness with quiet authority…Anne and Jean-Pierre…rise far above stereotypes. They are far too multifaceted, too complicated for that. Stone makes their relationship echo the tempestuous country where they meet and fall in love. And she places them in a story that is fast-paced, spiced with intrigue, and powered by the universal language of love. Exotic stuff, to be sure, yet as familiar as Romeo and Juliet.
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (USA Today)
“Stone tackles big themes – race, love, family, loyalty – and writes with the authority that comes from having spent two years in Burundi…Jean-Pierre and Anne are tormented by whether they made the right choices in life-and-death decisions…Stone’s triumph is that she enriches her story with grand ideas that funnel into just one: what is most important in this life?”
Review: The True Sources of the Nile (Boston Globe)
“A compelling tale of deep emotions flows through ‘Nile’…Deft perceptions and deep emotions, set against a real world most Westerners know little about, create a pleasing and promising first novel.”