Rockaway

Praise for Rockaway In Ison's poetic depiction, Rockaway is equal parts tourist trap and salt-sprayed idyll, where beachgoers frolic in the shadow of some potent dramatic irony: the reader's awareness of the devastation soon to arrive across the river makes for an unsettling countdown...Ison possesses a surfeit of wit and an especial knack for upending love story conventions...as the narrative swirls to a stylish and startling end. --The New York Times Book Review In Rockaway's narrative passages Ms. Ison's prose style is lovely and in places lyrical...[Sarah] is an engagingly complex character readers will hope to see more of.. --New York Journal of Books How tragic that this book --set in a Queens, New York, beach town that in real life was devastated by Sandy --has a new relevance. Sarah is a California painter who's come east for a retreat she hopes will revive her artistic passion. It's a sheer joy to stay in the company of Ison's voice. There's an unlikely relationship at the center, the kind of encounter that could happen only in the summertime suspension of 'ordinary' life. --Karen Russell, O Magazine Tara Ison is one of the premiere stylists of her generation, and on every page of Rockaway she writes sentences that are elegant and rich. Casually sensual in ways that will curl your toes, Ison refuses to look away from the ramifications of that same dark eroticism unleashed. It's no exaggeration to say Rockaway is pretty much perfect -- a meditation on art, aloneness, ambition, love, religion, and the unknowable and unquenchable thirst that is human desire. Just start reading. You won't stop. --Charles Bock Here is a young woman at the end of her leash, the end of her youth, the edge of her art, not doing a melancholy artist-on-the-beach thing, but confronting the many true colors of her life in this beautiful and dangerous season. Tara Ison's Rockaway is a stirring, fresh look at a tough passage. --Ron Car