Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City's Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing at New York University and Yale University and lives in Brooklyn.
"[A] remarkable funny-sad novel . . . Astonishing."
--Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times "Within moments of cracking
open the cover to Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland, I was sold . .
. A landmark work of literary science-fiction . . . A wonder . . .
as tender and intimate as it is conceptually courageous."
--Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle "Warm, witty, and touching, Beautyland
is an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and
belonging."
--Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire "The heroine of Marie-Helene
Bertino's strange, engrossing third novel is at once fully human
and entirely otherworldly . . . Underlying these paradoxes is the
poetic observation that there's nothing more human than the
experience of gazing out at a planet full of incomprehensible
people who look just like you and deciding that you must be from
outer space."
--Judy Berman, Time "A startling novel about a woman who believes
she is an alien . . . I read Beautyland in forty-eight hours and
was so distracted by the ending that I left my passport on the
plane."
--Charlotte Owen, Bustle "So surprising and so delightful."
--Gilbert Cruz, The New York Times Book Review "[The] kind of
fiction that, in its pitch-perfect encapsulation of reality,
functions to help us mourn the distance between the world we want
and the world as it is . . . Bertino has given us a novel about our
very real, very human longing for connection with one another."
--Shayne Terry, Chicago Review of Books "Wry, melancholy, utterly
bewitching . . . Deftly blurring the line between reality and
metaphor to create a work of exquisite beauty, joyfully off-kilter
humor, and aching sorrow, Beautyland, and Adina's lonesome journey,
will fill and then shatter your heart."
--Dan Sheehan, Literary Hub "[Beautyland] is interested in the
charged terrain of uncertainty and the tender ideas that emerge
when we poke at the unknown . . . From this gorgeous data of
existence, Bertino taps into a particular nostalgic awe familiar to
a generation of kids raised on Carl Sagan and inflatable lunchroom
planetariums . . . [Adina] continues to hope for something beyond
humanity, something better, and what could be more human than
that?"
--Hilary Leichter, BOMB "Wise, lyrical, and unwaveringly original .
. . A tender coming-of-age story, an imaginative thought
experiment, and a moving depiction of the pain and power that come
with being an outsider."
--Rachel Simon, Shondaland "Gorgeous . . . Surely one of the most
charming novels I've ever read."
--Thomas Morris, Electric Literature "Poignant and funny."
--Sophia June, Nylon "Bertino casts her wry and empathetic eye on
the wider universe . . . render[ing]the world in new and unexpected
ways."
--Jennifer Bort Yacovissi, Washington Independent Review of Books
"[An] excavation of the strange and wonderful and heart-wrenching
realities of what it means to be alive down here on Earth . . . In
Beautyland, that which is wonky and uncanny reveals itself in the
familiar details of everyday life . . . This is where the sorcery
lives . . . When Bertino writes of magic, of science fiction, of
the surreal, she is writing of reality."
--Madison Ford, Brooklyn Rail "An astonishing book about what it
means to be human (and alien) . . . Your heart needs it. Trust
me."
--Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk (on Instagram) "Poignant, bracing
. . . [Its] playfulness reveals possibilities and perspectives that
might be lost in a novel bound by fact-checked 21st century
reality."
--Lauren LeBlanc, Los Angeles Times "A singular novel with a
singular protagonist who has a singular view of the world . . .
Wonderfully quirky, funny, bittersweet. . . A very funny and
empathetic book that unravels the contradictions, complexities, and
weirdness of this thing we call life."
--Ian Mond, Locus Magazine "A delightful but heart-wrenching story
of womanhood, differentness, and trying to feel less alone."
--Steph Opitz, The Saturday Evening Post "Adina's alien status
might just be a metaphor, but the feelings of joy, pain, and
loneliness that surround her as she moves through life as a human
are as real as they get."
--Sam Franzini, Our Culture "Moving . . . Beautyland offers no easy
conclusions . . . but it works with increasing strength as a
portrait of the weirdly widespread alienation of the 21st
century."
--Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review "A compelling, touching story
that weds Bertino's masterful eye for the poignant detail of the
everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the
tallest kinds of tales--so tall, in this case, they are
interplanetary. A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth
and beauty."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "The triumphant latest from
Bertino offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from
the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from
another planet . . . Bertino nimbly portrays her protagonist's
alienhood as both metaphor and reality. The results are
divine."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Expertly imagination-bending
. . . With so much humor and heart, Bertino balances fantasy and
hyperrealism, metaphor and fact . . . It's like fiction was
invented for Adina and her tale, which unspools so assuredly
readers might mistake it for their own."
--Annie Bostrom, Booklist (starred review) "Beautiful and
refreshing and funny and heartbreaking, all at once."
--Erin Lyndal Martin, BookBrowse "This book is endlessly surprising
on the sentence level, but also as a story, and also in its
tenderness. We might all need the unexpected love and perspective
of a child alien at this point in human history. Beautyland is
beautiful and hilarious and transcendent. It honestly feels like a
message from another planet. Marie-Helene Bertino is an
otherworldly talent."
--Tommy Orange, author of There, There "In Beautyland, Marie-Helene
Bertino's Adina (maybe an alien, maybe a troubled human, always
both) takes the tired old world and describes it so perfectly that
we see it as if for the first time. Sparkling and alive, funny and
magnificently true, this book woke me up. It made me weep with
appreciation for the hard, strange, small-but-huge lives we lead.
It made me fall back in love with this universe."
--Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal "Beautyland is both an
otherworldly and completely human look into one girl's life,
written in concise, lyrical prose. It is richly allusive, funny,
and hypersmart. Marie-Helene Bertino has knocked it out of the park
with this one. I loved it."
--Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed "Marie-Helene Bertino's
delicious, uncanny vision throughout Beautyland makes everything
feel brand-new. The chapters are so propulsive one doesn't even
fully notice the way she's subtly deconstructing the world. One
page swiftly returns ubiquity to wonder, while the next reminds us
that cruelty is a choice, that nothing is inevitable but death.
It's impossible for a book to feel this fun and this urgent.
Beautyland is a miracle. I'll be rereading it forever."
--Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
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