B A R R E N
I S L A N D
CAROL ZOREF
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST
NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER
GOLDBERG PRIZE
AWP AWARD FOR THE NOVEL
How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York’s Jamaica Bay, where the city’s dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-19th century until the 1930’s. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh.
The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930’s affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World’s Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars. Barren Island, finally, is a novel in which the existence of God is argued with a God that may no longer exist or, perhaps, never did.
Advance praise for Barren Island
“Barren Island is a wonderful synthesis of character and history. From the moment Marta Eisenstein Lane begins to tell us about her remarkable family’s lives on the rank, forsaken sand bar of Barren Shoal, rendering animal carcasses into glue, the author immerses us in a world most readers would never otherwise have known existed. As squalid and hardscrabble as these lives may be, they are also suffused with strange beauty and love by Marta’s solicitude and honesty. Barren Island is big hearted, generous, and fascinating.”
— PAUL HARDING, author of Tinkers and Enon. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Fernanda Pivano Award for American Literature, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize
“What isn’t Carol Zoref’s remarkable first novel about? Set on a tiny, precarious, repugnant and rank splinter of land where New York City’s dead horses were once rendered into grease, her book is nevertheless rich with family, friendship, romance, and incipient moral consciousness on a tiny precarious planet with the smell of fascism in the air. In every way that matters, Barren Island is abundant.”
— MELVIN JULES BUKIET, author of After, Strange Fire, and other books
Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award
“What’s extraordinary about Barren Island isn’t just its wild corner of history – a shoal off the shores of Brooklyn, whose factory boils down animal carcasses for ‘glue and grease’ – but its remarkable imagining of the lives of families there. At its center is a resourceful young girl coming of age, and the novel does what only fiction can do – it presents the human intricacies we could hardly guess. An amazing piece of work.”
— JOAN SILBER, National Book Award Finalist for Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Household Words
“With warmth, intelligence, and a wryly humane voice, Carol Zoref gives us an unforgettable heroine and shines light on a forgotten chapter of the American story. Richly atmospheric and deeply tender, Barren Island is a thought-provoking pleasure.”
—BRIAN MORTON, author of Starting Out in the Evening, Florence Gordon, and other books. Winner of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Koret Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and the Guggenheim Foundation Award. Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Zoref is a fiction writer and essayist. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. She lives in New York City.
READINGS & EVENTS
September 12, 2019
Roosevelt Island, NY
ROOSEVELT ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Roosevelt Island Public Library
Main St., Roosevelt Island, NY
6:30 - 7:30 PM
August 5, 2019
New York City
SCRIBBLERS ON THE ROOF
Ansche Chesed
251 West 100 th St.
New York, NY 10025
8:00 - 10:00 PM
June 5, 2019
Roslyn Heights, NY
Temple Beth Sholom
Sandler Chapel
Roslyn Heights, NY 11577
7:00 PM
March 5, 2019
Naples, FL
GREAT NAPLES JEWISH BOOK FESTIVAL
Naples Conference Center
9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
March 16, 2019
Brooklyn, NY
Sebago Boat Club
Paerdegat Ave. North
Brooklyn, NY 11236
10:30 AM
January 31, 2019
New York City
HAROLD U. RIBALOW AWARD CEREMONY
40 Wall St., 8th Floor
New York, NY 10003
3:00 - 5:00 PM
By Invitation
April 25, 2018
New York City
SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE ALUMNI EVENT
Offices of Stephanie Cooper, Esq.
3 Columbus Circle
6:30--8:30 PM
Refreshments will be served
Registration contact:
Dania Abu-Shaheen, Director of Alumni Affairs
March 6, 2018
New York City
National Jewish Book Awards
Prince George Ballroom
15 East 27th St.
6:30--10:00 PM
Tickets available through Jewish Book Council
February 1, 2018
Scarsdale, New York
Scarsdale Literary Salon
Scarsdale Public Library
7:30--9:30 PM
December 5, 2017
Boca Raton, Florida
LEVIS JCC SANDLER CENTER
A Literary Afternoon
2:00--4:00 PM
November 17-18 2017
MIAMI, FLORIDA
Miami Book Fair
Saturday, 11/18
Room: 3313
12:30 p.m.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS FICTION NOMINEES
Carmen Maria Machado on Her Body and Other Parties
Elliot Ackerman on Dark at the Crossing
Lisa Ko on The Leavers
Min Jin Lee on Pachinko
Margeret Wilkerson Sexton on A Kind of Freedom
Carol Zoref on Barren Island
October 25, 2017
NEW YORK CITY
Nolita
MCNALLY JACKSON BOOKS
52 PRINCE STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10012
7:00 PM
New Issues Poetry & Prose Presents
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Elaine Sexton
Carol Zoref
June 15, 2017
The Bryant Library
2 Paper Mill Road
Roslyn, NY 11576
7:00 pm
ROSLYN, LONG ISLAND, NY
June 11, 2017
NEW HAVEN, CT
Yale University
Yale Writers’ Conference
1:30 - 2:45 pm
May 1, 2017
NEW YORK CITY, NY
New York University
NYU Bookstore
726 Broadway, New York 10003
6:30-7:30 pm
April 13, 2017
KALAMAZOO, MI
Western Michigan University
Frostic Reading Series
8:00 – 9:00 pm
Feb. 27, 2017
BRONXVILLE, NY
Sarah Lawrance College
Craft Talk
2:00 – 3:00 pm
Feb. 10, 2017
WASHINGTON, D.C.
AWP Annual Conference
(Association of Writers and Writing Programs)
AWP AWARD WINNERS READING
12:00—1:15pm
(AWP Bookfair Stage, Exhibit Halls D & E, Washington Convention Center, Level Two)
Book Signing/New Issues Poetry & Prose
4:00—5:00 pm
(Exhibitor Hall #714)
"Ask about the smell. That is what everyone asks no matter who or why or where they might be. It is the detail they want most when they hear about the horses and dogs and pigs that filled the barges; about the wake of stench when the meat markets closed for the day and the surgeries closed for the morning and the rest of New York paused in coffee shops and automats, in lunchrooms and kitchens and union halls, on curbsides and at cleared-away corners of the cutting tables in the garment factories on 39th Street to eat sandwiches made from animal parts, the ones that would not be burned that day on Barren Shoal."