Five by Laura Marello – available at online and local booksellers:

 

Gauguin’s Moon, Guernica Editions, Released October 2019

After a visit from her ancestors and two ex lovers, California painter Daniela searches the Pacific Islands for information about her family’s past, and her mother’s role in the nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll.

REVIEW: Laura Marello’s latest novel, Gauguin’s Moon, seethes with an intoxicating blend of wit, pathos, and hilarity that keeps us laughing even as it confronts us with disturbing truths — both personal and political. Her narrator, Daniella, is a 40-year-old artist who wakes one morning to find her home invaded by her dead mother, dead aunt, and two dead lovers, “all stylish people — my mother and Aunt Charlotte in the l940s, Upper West Side, Chanel / Houbignant, we’ve won-the-war-and-dominated-Europe sort of way; and Andrew and Elaine in the l980s, Laurel Canyon, Calvin Klein and Armani, greed-isn’t-good-but-it-looks-good sort of way.” Over the ensuing pages we move in and out of Daniella’s past, her dreams, and her artistic visions (half-reclining terracotta women, for example, who are “neither here nor there, like me”; a mysterious cliff-top doorway with a view of ocean and sky; a landscape of rain and fire). We follow her as — aided and abetted by her dead companions — she abruptly leaves the East Coast for California, delves into her past, and finally travels to Micronesia, where she begins to uncover the sources of her lifelong disorientation. Gauguin’s Moon is a book about the interweaving of life and art, the power of dreams and images, and our sacred responsibility for one another. Constance Solari, author of Sophie’s Fire

 

Balzac’s Robe and Other Poems by Laura Marello

to order Balzac’s Robe, click here

publisher: Finishing Line Press, second finalist, New Women’s Voices Series

cover image: painting by Brooke Marcy 

 

Maniac Drifter – comic literary novel

Guernica Editions 2016

Maya has amnesia about all her sexual experiences, but when her best friend Harper Martin is caught smuggling art objects into the country from Nicaragua she must forget her own problems and rally the townspeople of Provincetown to get him amnesty from prosecution. In the process of garnering town support she immerses herself in town politics and dynamics and uncovers the role of forgiveness in healing her own pain.

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The Gender of Inanimate Objects and Other Stories, released August 2015, Tailwinds Press NYC, available at online booksellers. Shortlisted for the Saroyan Literary Prize for portraying the immigrant experience, Stanford University Libraries, May 2016.

 A novella and five stories, set in Santa Cruz California, Provincetown Massachusetts, and Greece.

 

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   Tenants of the Hotel Biron, historical literary novel

Guernica Editions 2012

(an early draft of this novel is published by Gordon Lish in Q22).

In 1908, the poet Ranier Maria Rilke convinces sculptor Auguste Rodin to move into   the Hotel Biron, a Paris house whose rooms are being rented out to artists. Soon poet Jean Cocteau rents a bachelor flat and painter Henri Matisse gives art classes in the chapel.  Photographer Edward Steichen photographs Rodin’s Balzac by moonlight.  Picasso throws a party for fellow painter Henri Rousseau. Nijinsky models for Rodin and causes a scandal.

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Claiming Kin, literary coming-of-age novel,

Guernica Editions 2010

Andrea has an unusually keen sense of smell. As a result she holds family secrets without realizing it. As she approaches her twenties, those secrets threaten to reveal themselves and break her family apart. With this as the backdrop to her search, Andrea travels to California to work as a pheromone researcher and then to Italy and Paris to find her father and become a perfume maker.