Join us in the mezzanine above Green Apple Books on the Park for a reading and conversation between authors and esteemed teachers Sarah Stone and David Haynes to celebrate the release of Stone’s new linked novella collection, Marriage to the Sea.
Please note: This is an in-person event and will not be live-streamed or recorded. Our space is accessible via stairs in the children’s section of Green Apple.
In Marriage to the Sea, the Zamarins, a Jewish family of artists and activists, navigate the eco-crisis, political turmoil, personal losses, and the afterlife. In their love stories and adventures—spanning Paris, Venice, and a dreamy phantasmagorical underworld—each of them searches for the overlap between what the world needs and what they have to give.
When Katya, a rebellious bi+ sustainability activist, is visited by her father’s ghost one night, she decides he’s urging her to change her life. She and her youngest sister Arielle—a recovering addict and Shakespearean actress past her ingenue sell-by date—head to Paris on a quest to help his environmentalist heroine, and, along the way, they discover unexpected new loves among the living and the dead. Their Aunt Julia (a TV villainess returned to experimental theater) also falls recklessly in love, just as her meddling brother—and the whole theater company—arrive to stay with her. At every turn, the characters are forced to navigate a world in which the sea is rising and new social movements are taking shape.
Sarah Stone
(she/they)
Sarah Stone is the author of the forthcoming Marriage to the Sea (Four Way Books, March 2026), Hungry Ghost Theater (a finalist for the 38th annual Northern California Book Awards), and The True Sources of the Nile, as well as co-author, with Ron Nyren, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Sarah’s work has appeared in Image, Ploughshares, Necessary Fiction, 100 Word Story, StoryQuarterly, The Millions, Scoundrel Time, The Believer, CRAFT, Alta Journal online for the California Book Club, and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft. Her writing was included in the list of distinguished stories of 2020 in The Best American Short Stories 2021 edited by Jesmyn Ward.
David Haynes
(he/him)
David Haynes is the author of eight novels for adults and five books for younger readers. He is an emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for ten years. From 1996 through 2024 he taught regularly in MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His most recently novel is A STAR IN THE FACE OF THE SKY, and in 2023 he published a 30th anniversary edition of RIGHT BY MY SIDE as part of the Penguin Classic series. MARTHA’S DAUGHTER: A NOVELLA AND STORIES, his first collection of short fiction was released by McSweeney’s in September.
David serves as Board Chair for Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering, and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.