A Quitter's Paradise

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While the story is about the quintessential American family, it provides many layers to challenge one’s thought process. So much is evoked in the image of the sweet and nervous marmoset looking upon Eleanor as she tries to make sense of herself, working so hard to see herself with this kind of distance and perspective.

elysha chang

At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively readable, A Quitter’s Paradise is an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of grief, family bonds, and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves. Dror Cohen has so cleverly captured the irony of Eleanor’s preoccupation with seeing and thinking ‘clearly. According to her new husband, Ellis, at least—her marriage to whom Eleanor hasn’t yet shared with her mother, Rita. In A Quitter’s Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother’s death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own.Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. A riveting, wise, and singular novel about grief, love, longing, and the mysteries of family, A Quitter’s Paradise will linger in your heart and mind. Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Elysha Chang’s A Quitter’s Paradise, the first book on Sarah Jessica Parker’s imprint at Zando, forthcoming in June 2023.

Sarah Jessica Parker Launches Her New Literary Imprint

And Sarah Jessica Parker told us, “Dror’s stunning and evocative illustration captures Eleanor’s feelings of disconnect and seeking, while also speaking to the modern and beguiling prose. I finished this book in one day, which is fairly unusual for me, and I believe other readers would do the same! And then you develop a taste for music and a taste for art, and you’re kind of getting a big, full, rich world. And it’s true that Parker’s palpably enthusiastic about books she loves, whether on Instagram or during this interview.You’re on movie and television sets, and on theater stages—does that preparation and anxiety translate at all to the preparation and anxiety leading up to having a conversation with an author whose book you want to acquire, or to publication day? I became interested in that family dynamic—that there’s so much of our family history that we don’t know, we don’t have access to. As Eleanor’s avoidance of her feelings manifests in a series of outrageous—often hilarious—choices, her actions begin to threaten all she holds most dear. To echo what others have said, A Quitter’s Paradise is a stunning debut novel by Elysha Chang, introducing the world to Eleanor Liu and her family.

Review | NetGalley

An example: What does the American family experience look when the parents are immigrants, and their children are not? In Eleanor Lin and her family, Elysha Chang has created captivating characters, who continuously surprised, delighted, and intrigued me—so much so that I didn’t want to leave them.

And, as if in keeping with the scientific method, the characters’ narratives are peppered with questions: “What was its purpose? Flynn has her own eponymous imprint with Zando; its first book, Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy, launched in February, and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre will be out in July. This is juxtaposed with chapters about Eleanor’s family’s story, focusing on her father and her mother. Resisting at every turn, Eleanor tumbles blindly down a path that will force her to confront her present. What I was trying to express was that I didn’t want to co-opt an author and make them feel that that was my end point, that I just wanted to get my hands on the rights, you know?

A Quitter’s Paradise | Elysha Chang | 9781638930525 | NetGalley A Quitter’s Paradise | Elysha Chang | 9781638930525 | NetGalley

The novel examines what it means to be a family, and how, regardless of time and space, families can remain tied to each other, for better or worse. What struck me about this book was that it was exactly what I was looking for, which was a brand-new voice who was telling a story unfamiliar to me,” Parker says, “but also a story that would connect with readers who were looking for stories of their lives, who had yet to experience them in a book.This adds some key context to the decisions and guilt that Eleanor fields, on top of the grief, of having quit everything she—and her mother—had dreamed of her doing. The main obstacle to my simple, happy life,” muses Eleanor, the narrator of Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise , “was that I was prone to secret-keeping. At a lunch for A Place for Us, you said that you had a certain anxiety about coming into the book world feeling like you were a reader and not an editor, and that you were worried that people wouldn’t take the imprint seriously.