Sarah Gerard

The Bachelor franchise has been around for over two decades and amassed an army of fans across its four shows. While contestants battle to prove they’re here for the right reasons, Bachelor Nation is confronting their own question—Why are we here and why can’t we stop watching? Devout franchise fans Ilana Masad and Stevie Seibert Desjarlais pose the big questions to Bachelor Nation: Who are we? What does the franchise mean to us? And seriously, why on earth can we not stop watching? For years, fans of the Bachelor franchise have laughed with and at contestants; cried along with their heartbreaks; tuned in again and again each season despite feeling betrayed by producer and contestant decisions alike; and celebrated, alone and together, the love (or loveless) lives of perfect strangers on our television screens. And we wonder, really, why? With reality TV broadly characterized as “trash TV,” why are so many intelligent, funny, and critical people watching and discussing it? Here for All the Reasons seeks to answer this question, diving into the complex negotiations of gender, racial, and class politics that arise within the fandom. This anthology is a polyvocal exploration of Bachelor Nation for Bachelor Nation. So, will you accept our rose and join the chat?

Retro 4 is the latest collection of the best, the funniest, the strangest, and the most affecting stories from the award winning literary magazine, Joyland.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize A new paperback edition of the debut novel by award-winning author, Sarah Gerard--an intense, elegiac portrait of two young lovers as they battle personal afflictions and traverse the American countryside. Features a new introduction by Catherine Lacey. "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 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.

Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death―personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable―as "nuanced and subtly intimate" (NPR) as her lauded essay collection Sunshine State. On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn was a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong? This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrific tragedy. In Sarah's exploration of Carolyn's life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing Carolyn and Render's friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, reading obscure writings and internet posts, and attending Carolyn's memorials and Render's trial. What emerged from Sarah's relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to their darkest ends is a book that is at once a striking homage to Carolyn's life, a chilling excavation of a brutal crime, and a captivating whydunit with a shocking conclusion.

This is a limited edition hardcover. Sarah Gerard's The Butter House follows a woman who moves from a New York apartment to a Florida bungalow with her boyfriend. As she adapts to her new surroundings, the narrator navigates contradictory landscapes of love and possession, nature and built-environment, empathy and sympathy. She undergoes the arduous task of introducing two cats to the house and each other, while also becoming a surrogate caretaker for the neighborhood's feral cat colony. She grows a garden. She interrogates what it means to care for someone or something. Laced within these tender scenes, The Butter House chooses deliberate moments to scratch and bite with the ferocity of a territorial alley cat.

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay - Finalist for the Southern Book PrizeA 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 YearA 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 & Writers New and Noteworth Selection - A PW Top 10 Spring Pick in Essays & 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 YouSarah 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.

*Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist.*A Best Book of 2015 --NPR, BuzzFeed, Vanity Fair, Flavorwire, Largehearted Boy"Rhythmic, hallucinatory, yet vivid as crystal. Gerard has channeled her trials and tribulations into a work of heightened reality, one that sings to the lonely gravity of the human body." --NPRThe 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." The particular genius of Binary Star is that out of such grim material in constructs beauty. It's like a novel-shaped poem about addiction, codependence and the relentlessness of the everyday, a kind of elegy of emptiness." --New York Times Book Review