The Traces: An Essay
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The Traces is a ranging inquiry into the seductions of memory and travel, the fragile paradox of desire, and the art of making meaning from a life.
Mairead Small Staid’s debut, The Traces, is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Capri, The Traces draws on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson.
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Mairead Small Staid is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she was the George Bennett Fellow. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, The Believer, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.
Carlotta Brentan is a Meisner-trained actor and an award-winning audiobook narrator and producer who has worked in theater, film, commercials, and voiceover. A proud graduate of the three-year conservatory training program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and of the Academy Theatre Company, she is originally from Italy but is currently based in New York.
