White Swan, Black Swan: Stories - Hardcover

"Reading Adrienne Sharp's stories is like watching a magnificent ballet and then getting to go backstage and sneak straight into the dressing rooms, invisible. This book is a full theatrical experience, complete with demigod dancers and life-threatening passion, alongside absolute and terrifying human frailty."
—Aimee Bender, author of An Invisible Sign of My Own

"A stunningly lovely book about dance and dancers and their hard-won moments of beauty, but also about life at large. I can't believe it's a debut work - - it is brilliantly clear, dramatically swift, and knowingly conceived."
—John Casey, author of Spartina and The Half-Life of Happiness

"Adrienne Sharp writes with breathtaking perception about the needs and desires of the body, its resilience and its vulnerabilities. Art, passion, history, intersect with burning immediacy in this beautifully crafted book."
—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Mistress of Spices

"These lovely stories about ballet are themselves balletic. Adrienne Sharp's choreography is first-rate."
—John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor and The End of the Road

"In elegant prose, Sharp explores the world of ballet and its fringes, unafraid to look boldly beyond its beauty into darker aspects. This is a stellar debut."
—John Rechy, author of City of Night?

?Adrienne Sharp writes with breathtaking perception about the needs and desires of the body, its resilience and its vulnerabilities. Art, passion, history intersect with burning immediacy in this beautifully crafted book.?
?CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI
Author of The Mistress of Spices

The world?s most famous choreographer becomes infatuated with a talented young dancer who proves both siren and muse . . . A rising star plunges into an affair with a principal but finds that the ecstasy on the stage cannot be matched in the bedroom . . . A dying legend reflects on the fading beauty of a life in motion, lost to everything but memory. In this beguiling collection, Adrienne Sharp captures the essence and passion of ballet and its fleeting world and translates them into unforgettable stories. White Swan, Black Swan heralds the arrival of a unerringly graceful new voice in American fiction.