Grace Before the Fall
the new novel by
Geri Lipschultz
“Just imagine magical realism meets Alice in Wonderland.”
Available now:
Grace Before the Fall is a reminder that every girl has a little Joan of Arc in her wheelhouse. It is the time of the hostage crisis in Iran, and in New York City, it is long before the fall of the towers, just before AIDS has found itself a name, although young men are mysteriously dying, and Grace Rosinbloom is inheriting their furniture. In Geri Lipschultz’s virtual love letter to the metropolis, Grace—a former actor, a former grad student, currently a civil servant by default—becomes a lover with a mission, an accidental activist whose search for love and meaning opens up doors to her dreamworld. Here is a picaresque novel that veers into magic realism as it enters the mind of a woman called upon to take a stand. Although set in pre-9/11 NYC, the novel's concerns still hold: environmental corruption, the threat of nuclear war, the rise of whistle blowing, and cyber hacking.
Praise for Grace Before the Fall
“Voices dance above a terrestrial balloon of ruin. Yet dancing voices may save the world! Gracie is a Rose in Bloom in search of love and holiness. What does it mean, what does it take, asks Geri Lipschultz’s novel Grace Before the Fall, to live in full sincerity yet stay within the absurd, ambiguous contours of language and world–to turn the skin of the mind inside out as it learns to speak? This is a novel in bloom. In her search for salvation and meaning, Gracie Rosinbloom is an illustrious great-niece of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas In short, this is an intriguing and impressive book.”
–James Berger, author of The Meaning of Poems: Selected Poems (as) Poetics and other books of poetry and scholarship.
“Geri Lipschultz’s Grace Before the Fall will ask a lot of you, but when you pay your dues and enter its domain, your rewards will be ten-fold. It is a novel about a lot of things: America (always) at a crossroads; War and Peace (no less); and a deep belief in love and indelible friendships. But at rock bottom, at tip-top, and at every step along the way, it is far more about what it means to call brilliant usage of the English language an art. Here Geri’s artistry has been forty years in the making! I read it with deep appreciation, even astonishment, stopping often to say to myself, ‘I wish I had written that.’ I recommend it to everyone.”
–Richard Wiley, novelist and
PEN/Faulkner Award recipient
“To read Grace Before the Fall is to travel through time. Geri Lipschultz has captured not only the pivotal events of the 1970s, she’s also created an amazing heroine, Grace Rosinbloom, whose life and dreams magically merge to recreate what it was like to be a thirty-something-year-old woman living in New York City at that unusual time. I am reminded of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush”: “Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.” Grace is a person led by her dreams, pondering where reality ends and begins—and whether it matters. She senses the importance of what she is experiencing yet is unsure what to do with the advice she hears from her unusual guides: “So, save the world if you can find anything worth saving.” Grace knows. Everything. Everyone. Every moment.”
–Cornelia Guest, poet and professor