Lucy is born gifted and burdened with an “unsightly” right eye that sees far beyond the visible spectrum, giving her an uncanny view of events, things and people, including the dead. Her father is famous as an obscenely well-endowed men’s underwear model; her mother is famous as a sexy teenager modeling luxury automobiles—until wicked L.A. car dealer Mr. Wolf cons her into posing for increasingly explicit pinups. In language both wildly lyrical and transgressive, Lucy recounts the story of her “not smart” parents and Big Bad Wolf who becomes the catalyst for her conception and eventual calamity. Evoking the lean, compressed style of her award-winning book Drought (New Directions), Debra Di Blasi crafts an unrepentant tragicomedy navigating the complexities of beauty vs. “ugliness,” hate vs. love, sexual freedom vs. moral hypocrisy, and American materialism in the Atomic Age.
PRAISE
“In wildly inventive, propulsive prose, Debra Di Blasi’s The Birth of Eros takes us on a clear-eyed romp through the social and psychic underbelly of fifties America….at once a tale of ruthless exploitation and a rollicking ode to bodies and desire. I read it in one gasp.” –Janet Sarbanes, author of The Protester Has Been Released and Letters on the Autonomy Project
“At times beautiful, at times brutal, the real protagonist of Birth of Eros is language, the sexiest of unreliable narrators. In Debra Di Blasi’s wicked and wonderful imagination, a novel is a thing that erupts. The act of reading Birth of Eros is inextricable from erotic tension, mesmerizing.” –Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and With Animal
“Debra Di Blasi’s Birth of Eros, a voice-driven jewel box of tight, honed, sculpted sentences carrying the frequencies of Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, Kathy Acker, and Kathryn Davis, pulsates with emphatic philosophical inquiry and emotional verve across time and cultures. Through her exquisite blend of the brutal and the beautiful, Di Blasi deftly finds the historical bruise incurred by the gordian knot of sex and violence…” –Christopher Higgs, author of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney
“Genre bending. It's literature and art. There's mythology, symbolism, erotica, history, comedy, tragedy, poetic prose.... I was often dazzled by the language and style.” –Goodreads
“In wildly inventive, propulsive prose, Debra Di Blasi’s The Birth of Eros takes us on a clear-eyed romp through the social and psychic underbelly of fifties America….at once a tale of ruthless exploitation and a rollicking ode to bodies and desire. I read it in one gasp.” –Janet Sarbanes, author of The Protester Has Been Released and Letters on the Autonomy Project
“At times beautiful, at times brutal, the real protagonist of Birth of Eros is language, the sexiest of unreliable narrators. In Debra Di Blasi’s wicked and wonderful imagination, a novel is a thing that erupts. The act of reading Birth of Eros is inextricable from erotic tension, mesmerizing.” –Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and With Animal
“Debra Di Blasi’s Birth of Eros, a voice-driven jewel box of tight, honed, sculpted sentences carrying the frequencies of Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, Kathy Acker, and Kathryn Davis, pulsates with emphatic philosophical inquiry and emotional verve across time and cultures. Through her exquisite blend of the brutal and the beautiful, Di Blasi deftly finds the historical bruise incurred by the gordian knot of sex and violence…” –Christopher Higgs, author of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney
“Genre bending. It's literature and art. There's mythology, symbolism, erotica, history, comedy, tragedy, poetic prose.... I was often dazzled by the language and style.” –Goodreads
PRESS
- Finalist for Big Other's Best Fiction Book of 2022
- Interview at Stat of Rec
- Review in Temz Review
- Review in Heavy Feather Review
- Review in The Millions
- Playlist in largehearted boy
- Finalist for Big Other's Best Fiction Book of 2022
- Interview at Stat of Rec
- Review in Temz Review
- Review in Heavy Feather Review
- Review in The Millions
- Playlist in largehearted boy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Debra Di Blasi is a multiple award-winning author of 11 books, with prose and poetry published widely in notable anthologies of innovative literature and literary journals. Her writing has been reviewed in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Kansas City Star, Brevity, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Foreword, and many other publications. She is a former book publisher, educator and art writer who continues to speak on topics related to narrative nuance in the literary and visual arts.