Ghost Dance

"Although author Carole Maso follows the contours of fiction, style is everything in Ghost Dance, a strangely lovely and perplexing book . . . she has a fine ear and her literary gift is impressive." —San Francisco Chronicle Originally published in 1986, Ghost Dance is the first in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Carole Maso. Counterpoint is proud to reissue Maso's first novel more than thirty years later. In her elegy for a family broken apart and for a country wounded by injustice and corporate greed, Maso skillfully draws parallels between the personal tragedy and the larger tragedies unfolding in the country. Vanessa Turin's family has been broken up by an event so devastating she cannot bear to face it straight on. Her mother, the brilliant and beautiful poet Christine Wing, seems simply to have disappeared. Then her gentle, silent father also vanishes, his car found outside New York Harbor filled with brochures describing fjords. And her brother Fletcher, travels in rage across the country, sending Vanessa fractured messages on picture postcards. In Ghost Dance, the reader experiences firsthand the dimensions of Vanessa's longing, the capabilities of her imagination, the persistence of her memory, the ferocity of her love as she struggles to retrieve her family, to reclaim her country, and to come to terms with overwhelming sorrow.