Hungry Ghost Theater

by Sarah Stone

An inventive, funny, sometimes heart-breaking exploration of the connections between art and hunger, duty and desire, and loss and survival. Brother and sister Robert and Julia Zamarin are trying to awaken the world to its peril with their tiny political theater company, while their sister Eva, a neuroscientist, searches for the biological roots of empathy. As Julia attempts to break free of Robert's influence, Robert, as lost without her as she is without him, takes on dark material and drives away members of their company. Meanwhile, the whole family contends with the ongoing troubles of Eva's youngest daughter, Arielle, as she struggles with addiction. Finally, after a family catastrophe, Julia and Robert reunite to create a new piece in a possibly haunted theater institute. When Arielle shows up after her latest relapse, they all have to find a new way of living in--and with--a world out of balance.

The adventures of the eccentric, memorable Zamarin family take the reader from San Francisco to Seoul, from theater spaces to psychiatric hospitals, from Zanzibar to the Santa Cruz Mountains, and into and through a series of Sumerian and Tibetan hells. This imaginative, provocative novel is a contemporary Inferno for fans of Margaret Atwood, Ruth Ozeki, and Lydia Millet.

"Sarah Stone traces out the quirky, fateful dramas of one family, while having the visionary originality to take the longest possible view of human action. I found this an unforgettable book, astute, vivid, and stubbornly ambitious in its scope." --Joan Silber

"With her laser intelligence and gorgeous prose style, Sarah Stone has written a thrilling hybrid of a novel about the intricacies of family life and the inevitable handing down from one generation to the next of our deepest passions and pathologies. Set around the world--and in the next one--this book is both marvelously inventive and deeply humane. I loved it."--Ann Packer

Genres: Fiction

316 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2018

About the author

Sarah Stone’s new book, Marriage to the Sea: Linked Novellas, came out on March 15 (Four Way Books). Her previous books include The True Sources of the Nile and Hungry Ghost Theater, a finalist for the 38th Annual Northern California Book Awards. Sarah is also the co-author, with Ron Nyren, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Her work has appeared in Image, Ploughshares, Necessary Fiction, 100 Word Story, StoryQuarterly, The Millions, Scoundrel Time, The Believer, CRAFT, Alta Journal online for the California Book Club, and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, and was included in the list of distinguished stories of 2020 in The Best American Short Stories 2021, Jesmyn Ward, editor. Sarah is a former LABA Fellow and a Jewish Studio Project creative facilitator and has taught for UC Berkeley, the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and Stanford Continuing Studies, among other places. She has also written for and taught on Korean television, reported on human rights in Burundi, looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute, and worked as a psychiatric aide in a locked facility, a graveyard-shift waitress in the restaurant where everyone went after they’d been thrown out of all the bars in town, and an office worker in an apparently haunted massage/bodywork school in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Reviews

[Marcy Dermansky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book while California is on fire and I see a picture of the author wearing a mask to breathe in the air.HUNGRY GHOST THEATER is such a rich and complicated book, spanning time, Points of View, styles, an experimental theater company, a family with a crazy history of mental illness, sisters who seem real to me. This book takes me to places I have never been, which is why I like to read fiction.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

The family at the heart of this amazing book are amazing themselves. Members include scientists, activists, artists, performers, philosophers, Holocaust survivors, and yes, ghosts. Sarah Stone explores themes ranging from spirituality in everyday life and political upheavals, the evils of addiction and the unbreakable family ties that transcend generations. And she does it beautifully with prose and imagery that is never cliched. This is one of those books that makes you glad you love to read.

[Anne Raeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have spent the Thanksgiving holiday in the company of the marvelously flawed, quintessentially human characters of Hungry Ghost Theater, and I cannot think of a better way to have spent this time off. Today I am mulling everything over, thinking about the idea of hunger and how it really is key to so many things both psychological and political. I found myself so pulled into the world of this family and of the theater. I was also really interested in Sarah Stone's examination of life as acting and the boundaries between artifice and reality. There is really so much to think about, which is exactly what I want in a book. Plus, there is mythology. I was fascinated by mythology, just like one of the main characters, Julia, when I was a child, but it's not easy to do what Stone did— make the metaphorical, mythological pieces fresh and work with the very real, modern lives of the characters. I also very much admired how she explored mental illness and addiction, not as a diagnosis but almost as a metaphysical condition. I loved the sections with Gina at Shoreside. There is so much bad and clichéd writing about these topics, so it was refreshing to read this approach. I know that Hungry Ghost Theater will continue to resonate for a long time. Congratulations to Sarah Stone on a beautiful and profound book.

[L.K. Simonds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Stone's performance in Hungry Ghost Theater is comparable to a master pianist walking on stage, saying, "Throw open the lid and let me show what I've got." If you have skills, why not show them off?

I've never read a novel with more variegated prose. It reflects life that way, and like life keeps the reader just a little unbalanced, unsure what's coming around the next bend. The novel pivots on the Hungry Ghost Theater (at least, this is my interpretation) and I thought, Is this happening? This is really happening. First unseen, then seen. Life is that way, actually. It can change so suddenly, seemingly.

The Zamarin family are, for all their thrashing about, so connected to one another by love. I really appreciate their tenderness and generosity. I love their individuality, their quests, their passions, and their fierce devotion. I love the backstory that informs their thoughts and actions, and the glimpses we get of it, here and there.

There are many "droplets of originality" in the book. Here are a few:

"Beauty, my dears, is a matter of millimeters." (Love this and so true)

"Desire for him ran all through her, flipping on the switches in the darkened house."

"...the difference between crazy and noncrazy is whether you can keep it to yourself."

"She pulls apart a thigh and drumstick, torquing the bones and giving them a quick snap. A little trail of veins hangs out of the knot of fat and gristle, and still Katya wants that chicken." (Okay, it's graphic, but oh my! Every word is perfect.)

Many images from this novel remain with me. What remains with me most of all is its exploration of the appetites that bring us our greatest pleasure and our greatest pain.

[Christy Stillwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immediately went on my Favorites shelf. I loved these characters dearly. This a big, satisfying read. The three main characters, siblings, Eva, Julia and Robert Zamarin, have much to teach us about family, mental illness, and, well, everything. Julia and Robert run a theater company while Eva is the scientist. I admired the narrative movement throughout the novel. Readers enter the mind of every character, including each of Eva's children, Eva's husband, even the unforgettable Zamarin parents. Only Julia gets to use first person, and the book does feel mostly hers. The story weaves forward and backward in time and truly unbearable events are put into script form--yes, sounds experimental but you will not be confused, not once, in the hands of this masterful storyteller. The novel has much to say about substance abuse and mental instability; though that sounds dark, the way its handled here widens the definition of those two ugly words, "mental instability. " These are people we can relate to, even love--even the residents of the nuthouse we love and understand. They don't seem remotely crazy, even if they can't function in the "normal" world, a world in which, increasingly, all of us are asking Who can? Who functions well in this world we've made? Family loyalty, life long struggles of forgiveness and self actualization and of course, the continual redefinition of what it means to be sane. One of my top three of 2018.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novelist sets a stage and tries to represent life thereupon. In contemporary fiction, it is usually a concentrated, socio-cultural slice of reality, but Sarah Stone draws her magic circle around everything from mythology to neuroscience, addiction to murder, Abu Ghraib to the Shoah.

Fundamental to this piece of theater is the aforementioned representation. How do thespians (read: author) represent the world? For the News-of-the-World Theater company this is a constant struggle. For some within the company (and their family members) this is a questionable endeavor to begin with. Not how do you but can you and are you trying to at the expense of living? As the stories of three generations of monomaniacal beings unfold on the narrative stage, the scope of their tragi-comedy widens to encompass a history (from ancient myth to these socio-ecological End Times) of humans striving for....what?

The central image of hungry ghosts fighting over food they can't eat intimates an unconsoling answer.

[Alta]

A complex contemporary family drama written in an energetic, witty style, which may appeal in particular to Northern Californians as well as international travelers.

[Ann Gelder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A meditation on mental illness, family legacies, and art--that is also a page-turner. I don't know how Sarah Stone did this, but it's fabulous.

[Bernadette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a complex novel primarily about the bonds of family, but it also explores ideas concerning theatre, mythology and resilience in the face of mental health and substance use problems. It uses multiple points of view and each chapter involves a relative or acquaintance of actor Julia and her scientist sister Eva. I'm not usually a fan of novels that are essentially composed of interlinked short stories and I found some chapters resonated with me more than others, but I've found myself dwelling on the motivations and choices of some of the characters long after finishing the book. I would have been happy to stay with Eva's point of view as I found the chapter Rescue to be incredibly powerful and moving, but the beauty - and challenge - of having interlinked stories is that they take you out of your comfort zone. As a reader, you're also kept on your toes due to unexpected style shifts from prose to play scripts, reflecting the experimental nature of the dance-theatre company Julia and her older brother Robert co-direct. This isn't an easy novel to read in terms of the ideas explored and it sent me searching for information about Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed as well as Sumerian mythology. But ultimately, it's about the bonds that exist between family members in the face of internal and external crises. Sarah Stone is to be congratulated for writing such an ambitious, sprawling and inventive work.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hungry Ghost Theater is both devastating and beautiful, exploring a wide range of human experience and its thorniest questions. While the book delves into everything from geopolitics to personal eating habits, it is always rooted in a deeply relatable humanity that makes it neither abstractly philosophical nor preachy.

The book seems especially relevant for our current era, when many are facing some of the major themes of the book, including coping with the fallout from intergenerational trauma, and how to find meaning in a world filled with increasing suffering and chaos.

Despite these heavy themes, it also manages to be a playful and funny book, exceptionally well-rounded.

[Genanne Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A riveting, slyly funny, deeply political novel about an unforgettable family. Sarah Stone has a talent for bringing big ideas - about hunger in all its permutations, and our place as witnesses in a world in crisis, and how mythology intersects with our modern lives - into the personal realm. Her characters are fascinating and indelible - I worried for them and admired them - and by the end of the novel feel like I know the Zamarins as well as some living and breathing friends. A remarkable read.

[Judith Pratt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because I love the title.
An experimental, collective, multi-faceted theatre troupe uses dance, words, etc. to create stories.
Their various family members are at least as strange and dysfunctional.
one reviewer said it's about the "blurred boundaries between art and life."
another, that is deals with "our deepest passions and pathologies.."
Not an easy book. I think I'll have to read it again.

[Harriet · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dazzling, unusual, and brilliant novel, compelling in its portrayal of a family of artists, searchers, and creators of experimental theater that plays on the boundary of earth and spirit. Once you meet these characters, you will love them, in all their intricacies and flaws and passions -- including one of the most moving characters, a younger family member, Arielle, struggling with addiction -- and you will always remember them, and carry them with you.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was delicious, and richly layered.