Dear Friends,

Last Radiance my love letter to the cultural avant-garde and pacifist left. This is my love letter to George Bartenieff, Julian Beck and so many more. This is my love letter to all of us who have sought a better world, and live to make that happen. Last Radiance is personal, revelatory and, I hope, inspiring.

Please consider pre-ordering the book as this will be a step toward having it the noticed. Here is the link to the online store. https://vineleavespress.myshopify.com/

With thanks and love

Karen

Advance Praise:

“Illness is a metaphor for our anguished world, as Karen Malpede’s harrowing and haunting, but also joyful, Last Radiance makes clear.  Malpede’s memoir of a life lived in the cultural avante-guarde is a rare book that forces us to sit with death and despair, and in the process teaches us new ways to be alive. We’ve become numb to the word cancer, as we have to war. Malpede’s honest, limpid prose forces us to feel again, not merely to assign meaning to sickness – our own and that of our loved ones -- but to see sickness in its social totality.  A bracing and true book.”
-Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize winning author The End of the Myth, America, America

“A wonderful, important book about the theater and about love.”
-Kathleen Chalfant, award winning stage and screen actor

“Karen Malpede's Last Radiance is a stunning work -- a book that somehow manages to be a coming of age story, a memoir of deep love and searing loss, and a sweeping cultural history of New York City avant-garde theater and activism spanning from the 1960s to the present. Malpede's voice is strong and her eyes are clear; she examines her own history through a well-earned, unafraid lens, looking at everything, knowing fully what is important. If only we were all this devoted -- to love, to art, to writing, to seeing the world so clearly. A deep, moving work; Malpede's story will stay with me.”
-Nellie Herman, author, The Cure for Grief, Season of Migration

 
”Lucky you to have found this book by playwright Karen Malpede!  Here in lies a deeply human secret history; a poetic memoir of the American avant-garde.

This is a world of magic and passion that only someone who lived it can transmit. No dry academic theories here ! This is a jewel box of lived politics, lived aesthetics, lived poetry and lived art that is disappearing. Savor it! Carry the history.”
-Penny Arcade, performance artist

“George Bartenieff lived an exemplary life in the theatre, using his great gifts as an actor not just for his own fulfilment, but always, practically and imaginatively, for the fulfilment of others.”
-David Hare, playwright

“Karen Malpede achieves the writer’s dream—a simultaneity of unheard past, screaming present, and cresting future where “language could hurt” but “absolute kindness, fierceness of vision, and commitment to act . .  . bring grace into a world through luminous gaze and deep attention.” Only Malpede’s own words from this astonishing book match the intensity of its bravery and truth. Although cancer and grief are its alleged subjects, its subterranean magma erupts to command us to “wonder at life every moment” and to be equal to it.”
-Rita Charon, Founding Chair, Narrative Medicine, Columbia University

“What an important book it is in several different ways — as a memoir of cancer (and indictment of cancer treatment and healthcare in general), a biographical portrait of George Bartenieff and others, a memoir of a marriage, and a history of poetic theater.”
-Joan Wickersham, National Book Award Finalist and author of The Suicide Index

”Truly eloquent and very, very moving.  

The writing is a form of poetry, only much less abstract and the metaphors are all tangible. The description of being alive while dying made me cry. It's such a brave testament to what all of us are terrified of and it's full of love and softness, too.”
-Avra Sidirpoulou, Director, Persona Theatre, Greece

“Fascinating and Moving. Karen Malpede takes us on a searingly personal tour of her life in art at the beating heart of the avant-garde political theater movement based in New York City from the NChaikin, and George Bartenieff, she bears passionate witness to the roots of today’s experimental theater and makes us feel we’ve lived through it ourselves, while navigating us through a perilous dance of cancer treatments, poised on the edge of life and death.”
-Jay O. Sanders & Maryann Plunkett, New York City-based actors

“Across decades, Karen Malpede has safeguarded embers of unpopular feminisms with fierce humility. She chose not to compromise in her commitment to seeing accurately, and to remembering. She models a life lived in conscious proximity to disconcerting and existential truth. And she showed me how to uphold Motherhood in the face of annihilation, amnesia, and erasure.”
-Anohni