Author Caro De Robertis visits North Branch to discuss their new book The Palace of Eros with author Cristina Garcia Copies will be available for purchase at the event from Mrs. Dalloway's.
About The Palace of Eros:
From the award-winning author of Cantoras, a bold and subversive feminist retelling of the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros explores the power of queer joy and freedom.
Young, headstrong Psyche has captured the eyes of every suitor in town and far beyond with her tempestuous beauty, which has made her irresistible as a woman yet undesirable as a wife. Secretly, she longs for a life away from the expectations and demands of men. When her father realizes that the future of his family and town will be forever cursed unless he appeases an enraged Aphrodite, he follows the orders of the Oracle, tying Psyche to a rock to be ravaged by a monstrous husband. And yet a monster never arrives.
When Eros, nonbinary deity of desire, sees Psyche, she cannot fulfill her promise to her mother Aphrodite to destroy the mortal young woman. Instead, Eros devises a plan to sweep Psyche away to an idyllic palace, hidden from the prying eyes of Aphrodite, Zeus, and the outside world. There, against the dire dictates of Olympus, Eros and Psyche fall in love. Each night, Eros visits Psyche under the cover of impenetrable darkness, where they both experience untold passion and love. But each morning, Eros flies away before light comes to break the spell of the palace that keeps them safe.
Before long, Psyche’s nights spent in pleasure turn to days filled with doubts, as she grapples with the cost of secrecy and the complexities of freedom and desire. Restless and spurred by her sisters to reveal Eros’s true nature, she breaks her trust and forces a reckoning that tests them both—and transforms the very heavens.
Told in bold and sparkling prose from “a brilliant and luminous writer” (Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author), The Palace of Eros transports us to a magical world imbued by divine forces as well as everyday realities, where palaces glitter with magic even as ordinary people fight for freedom in a society that fears the unknown.
About Caro:
A writer of Uruguayan origins, Caro De Robertis is the author of the forthcoming novel The Palace of Eros, as well as The President and the Frog, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; Cantoras, winner of a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice; The Gods of Tango, winner of a Stonewall Book Award; Perla; and the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain, which received Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.
De Robertis is also an award-winning translator of Latin American and Spanish literature, and editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times. In 2017, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis on its 100 List of “people, organizations, and movements that are shaping the future of culture.” In 2022, they were an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, gathering oral histories of queer and trans BIPOC elders in collaboration with Baldwin for the Arts and the Center for Oral History at Columbia University. De Robertis is a professor at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland, California with their two children.
About Cristina:
Cristina García is the author of eight novels including Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Here in Berlin, and most recently Vanishing Maps (Knopf, July 2023).
García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fifteen languages. She’s taught at universities nationwide and is a former Resident Playwright at Central Works Theater in Berkeley