The Traces

An Essay

By: Mairead Small Staid

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Paperback | 15 December 2022

At a Glance

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252 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.9 x 13.9

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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.

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 Venice, drawing on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, and spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson, The Traces is an ecstatic, insightful, and original debut.

Industry Reviews

"A stunning exploration of happiness and memory. These brilliant, beautiful essays challenged and delighted me. A transcendent debut." -Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half

"Lyric and enigmatic, The Traces hints at every turn some imminent parting of the veils. Mairead Small Staid wraps her personal narrative in rich speculative cloth. Italy crowds the senses. Reading, I remembered my delight as a child watching iron filings moving slowly into design as the magnet approached the sheet of paper from below." -Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

"Mairead Small Staid is an exceptionally delightful critic, with a lavish, forceful intellect and a style marked by cross-disciplinary ignition and pointillistic grace. In The Traces, which is the kind of book that'll be passed around like a good secret, she pursues happiness as a magic aberration, a subject as fraught and consequential as its well-trod opposite. Immortalizing one golden season in Florence, she captures the flux of her own personhood and potential-and ours, too-under the influence of time, art, weather, love, and chance." -Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

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