Some Place Quite Unknown – A novel by Jane Lazarre

by | Oct 1, 2011 | Press Releases

Hamilton Stone Editions announces the publication in January 2009 of Some Place Quite Unknown. In her latest novel, Jane Lazarre explores memory and imagination-the intersection between what we have experienced and what we envisage- through a multi-layered telling of the main character’s lived, interior and literary story. The writer Jaime Manrique (Our Lives Are the Rivers, Twilight at the Equator) describes Some Place Quite Unknown as “intimate and as urgent as a poem” and says Lazarre’s “enraptured and lyrical prose probes, with vigor and startling artistry, the deepest places of a women’s heart.”

Jane Lazarre is the author of many works. American Book Review describes her novel, The Powers of Charlotte, as “a beautifully written tour de force of a novel.” Sara Ruddick writes that Worlds Beyond My Control is…a wonderful novel – generous, wise, brave and enthralling.” Lazarre’s memoirs (The Mother Knot, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, and Wet Earth and Dreams, A Narrative of Grief and Recovery) have been praised for their honest, clear and resonant writing:

For Wet Earth and Dreams

“Lazarre’s severe honesty is served by a perfected literary style of classical clarity and restraint.” – Phillip Lopate

For Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness

“An important affirmation of a white woman’s love of her black sons. Jane Lazarre, warrior mom, has crossed over.” – Alice Walker
“Lazarre’s voice is artful and measured … substantial food for thought on the murky issue of race in America.” – Publisher’s Weekly
“A beautifully written, deeply thoughtful journey….” – Kirkus Reviews
“Through its luminous beauty, passionate authority, truth and power – we see, feel, understand what we never have before, the ways of the Whiteness of Whiteness.” – Tillie Olsen

For The Mother Knot

“A wholly original and important book … I can’t imagine a woman who would not be moved, or a man who would not be enlightened.” – Adrienne Rich
Lazarre’s works have been translated into many languages, and her short fiction and essays have been widely anthologized. With John Edgar Wideman, she was a featured writer, discussing autobiography and race, in the PBS series, Matters of Race directed by the filmmaker Orlando Bagwell (Eyes On the Prize, Africans in America). Formerly on the faculty and a director of the Writing Program at Eugene Lang College/The New School, Lazarre has received awards for both writing and teaching. Lazarre recently completed a novel, Inheritance, and a book of poems, Bodies of Water. Of Inheritance, Nan Gefen (Publisher, Persimmon Tree) says it is “… beautifully written — shows how the themes of race play out in the most personal ways.” Lazarre is currently working on a memoir about writing and teaching.

Selections from Hamilton Stone Editons’ Book List for 2008: The Horse and the Elephant

by | May 2, 2008 | Interviews

“The narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces most forcefully in certain kinds of psychoanalysis, and Cardinal proves herself ideal in rendering this ‘deep story’ aspect of her life.” (Toni Morrison, from Playing in the Dark p. v, writing about a story of an emergence from madness, The Words to Say It, by Marie Cardinal)

Continue Reading:
http://www.hamiltonstone.org/hsr14fiction.html#lazarre

A Sort of Perfection – An interview with writer Jane Lazarre

by | Jan 18, 2008 | Interviews

Although Jane Lazarre’s remarkable memoir of her first years of motherhood was published nearly 30 years ago, the resonance — and relevance — of her story has barely faded. In The Mother Knot, Lazarre writes unsparingly of “the strange and paradoxical way in which the infinite kind of love we feel for our children is locked into the dull, enervating routine of caring for them,” and of her personal struggle to liberate enough solitude and time from the steady pull of marriage and motherhood to honor her own creative drive. In her more recent works, which include the 1991 novel Worlds Beyond My Control and the memoir Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness (1999), Lazarre continues to use the lens of motherhood to expand the themes of attachment and separation, self and other, Blackness and whiteness, silence and the power of truth.

Continue Reading:
http://www.mothersmovement.org/features/05/jane_lazarre/a_sort_of_perfection.htm

Matters of Race

by | Apr 1, 2003 | Documentary

Jane Lazarre is an award-winning writer of fiction, memoir and personal essay. Her most recent books are Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: A Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, and, Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery, both published by Duke University Press. Duke has also reissued her first memoir, The Mother Knot. She has read her work and spoken about writing, race and American identities in many universities, conferences and secondary schools. She is on the faculty of Eugene Lang College, New School University, where she directed the Creative Writing Program for many years and now teaches writing and literature. She is the recipient of the prestigious University Teaching Award. She has recently completed a novel, Three White Women, and edited a collection of essays, Writers Teaching Writing. She is at work on a collection of her own essays entitled, Writing As A Beautiful Resistance.

Continue Reading:
http://www.pbs.org/mattersofrace/lm_bios.shtml