Isadora

"The endlessly inventive Gray (whose story “Labyrinth” from The New Yorker is a gem) creates a fictional interpretation of Isadora Duncan, once described as the “woman who put the Modern into Modern Dance.” A dancer who mixed the classical, sacred, and sensual, Duncan is the perfect subject matter for Gray; if a writer can expertly resurrect the Theseus myth at a small-town fair, then she can do justice to a life as inspiring—and troubled—as Duncan’s."—The Millions (Most Anticipated Books of 2017)

"Gray isn’t the first or the last novelist to take on Isadora Duncan’s outsize, groundbreaking, tragic life. But she might be the weirdest, in a good way. Gray’s stories have tended toward fabulist absurdism. Her treatment of Duncan in the wake of her children’s death by drowning is relatively conventional—half-crazed first-person narration intercut with the perspectives of those struggling to keep Duncan’s life together. But Gray attacks it without the usual guardrails of fictional biography, emerging with something perhaps more emotionally accurate."—Vulture Spring Book Preview

"[A] deeply inquisitive and empathic story of epic grief . . . Historical novels about artists abound, but few attain the psychological intricacy, fluency of imagination, lacerating wit, or intoxicating beauty of Gray’s tale of Isadora Duncan . . . Gray, performing her own extraordinary artistic leap, explores the nexus between body and mind, loss and creativity, love and ambition, and birth and death. The spellbinding result is a mythic, fiercely insightful, mordantly funny, and profoundly revelatory portrait of an intrepid and indelible artist.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"Captivating historical fiction . . . Gray does a terrific job of depicting not just the bereavement of a mother, but also the bereavement of a mother for whom life is a source of fuel for art . . . A novel equal to its larger-than-life protagonist."—Kirkus Reviews