These are glimpses of some of the haunting scenes and characters that people Carole Maso’s Aureole. Taking inspiration from earlier experimenters like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, Maso here explores the yearnings of a group of characters intuitively connected by desire—people whose lives touch each other, lap against each other, both in reality and in sexual reverie. Part novel, part poetic journal Aureole weaves their stories together in a work of great beauty and simplicity. "Line by line I have tried to get closer to an erotic language, a language that might function more bodily, more physically," the author says in her preface. Desire is, in a sense, the subject of this book, and few writers have rendered the heat of passion, the ecstatic moment, as convincingly a Carole Maso does here.

"Whether she is writing about two women washing lentils or a man’s desire for a woman’s pair of ink-stained hands, Maso charges her very sentences with such sexual energy that form and content literally become one. Reading Aureole is pure pleasure." — Marjorie Perloff

"Maso’s voice is all her own: simultaneously cerebral and sensual, violently romantic and insistently woman-centered." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Carole Maso is that rare creature — an original! Her voice and vision are like no one else’s." — Edmund White

"Maso is gaining a reputation for reshaping language and form in unique, beautiful, experimental yet totally readable ways. She epitomizes all that is great about American literature today." — Los Angeles Times

Carole Maso is the author of Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, Defiance, and other novels. She has received many awards, most recently the Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction.