When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she's still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender.
The Dead Ladies Project is an account of that journey—but it's also much, much more. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependent on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.
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"I'd follow Jessa Crispin to the ends of the earth."
— Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex
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Jessa Crispin is the editor and founder of the online magazines Bookslut — one of America’s very first book blogs — and the literary journal Spolia. She is the author of The Dead Ladies Project and The Creative Tarot, and has written for the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR.org, Chicago Sun-Times, and Architect Magazine, among other publications. She has lived in Lincoln, Kansas; Austin, Texas; Dublin, Ireland; Chicago, Illinois; Berlin, Germany; and elsewhere, and currently resides in New York City.
Amy McFadden has narrated more than two hundred titles in many different genres. She is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and has been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has acted on stage throughout Michigan for more than twenty years and in commercials and film for ten years. She is a founding member of Dog Story Theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan.