Product Details:
Paperback : 260 Pages
ISBN : 9781951631758
Cover design: Gwen Grafft
About the Book:
Julia Harlan, a free spirit with a guilty conscience, inherits a desolate piece of the California desert from her former employer, an eccentric movie star. She turns the estate, equipped with 11 casitas in various states of disrepair, into a funky refuge for people seeking solitude to mourn, which, in jest, she calls, “Grief Camp.” Guests experience home cooked meals, sunset meditation, and weekly visits from a self-proclaimed “consciousness doula” practiced in the art of tarot card readings and micro dosing. But right before an unexpectedly intense monsoon washes out the road, a detective arrives investigating the meaning of inheritance.
Told from multiple perspectives of misfits hiding out in an offbeat desert paradise, Grief Camp is a darkly comic, propulsive exploration of celebrity worship and complicity.
About the Author:
Cassandra Lewis was awarded the PEN America/L’Engle Rahman Prize, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.. Her writing has been published in several anthologies, including No Contact: Writers on Estrangement, edited by Jenny Bartoy, as well as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Broad Street Review, and The Belladonna Comedy. Her work has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Winter Workshop. Born in Washington, DC, she has lived in California, New Mexico, New York, and now resides with her family in a forested hideout in the Greater Philadelphia area.
“Funny and tender, rollicking and wise, Cassandra Lewis creates a world you’ll want to run away and live in forever.”
“I devoured Grief Camp, a gorgeously written, addictive, pitch-dark, hilarious, and devastating tale full of dreamers, seekers, and fugitives encountering each other on an old desert estate turned into a precarious but genuine community. It’s a ghost story, a mystery, a series of profound lessons on the state of our contemporary world, and an urgent recounting of complicity and survival.”