Cover design by Maria Miu
INTERVIEWS, EXCERPTS, WRITING, AND PRAISE
INTERVIEWS:
PODCASTS:
“Are you there, ghost? It’s me, Chiwan” An interview with Chiwan Choi on the Paranormal Network, where we discuss ghosts, art, and THE TRUE
EXCERPTS:
VOL. 1 BROOKLYN, FEATURED LIT, NOVEMBER 2ND, 2021 “Ducu (Alive)”
HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW, November 3rd, 2021 “A dream of trees and television and ghosts”
WRITING:
LARGEHEARTED BOY, Sarah’s music “Playlist” while writing The True, October 2021
PRAISE:
“Sarah Kornfeld’s The True is an extraordinary satire of the corrupt economy engulfing the world. In this ambitious book, the author explores how she gets lost in a cultural dreamscape, a nightmare we all now share…Employing a prismatic narrative, The True may be a new form of “post-post-truth literature,” offering a new lens by which we can explore not only our shared alienation, but our global connection.”
— Rain Taxi Review (Ekua Agha, reviewer)
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"The True is a shocking testimony about a reality that we, those who live in Romania, still refuse to acknowledge...A lesson in sincere self-analysis, which also contains the truth about us here. It should give us the courage to tell more."
—Istvan Teglas, Actor/Artist, The National Theater, Bucharest
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“Have you ever stalked a corpse, or been haunted by a memory that never existed? Sarah Kornfeld’s narrative non-fiction book The True is an unflinching examination of all the little lies we tell ourselves and the disappointments of daily existence. It’s the story of why we do the things we do — date the right people at the wrong time or the wrong people all the time — until we end up in a psychic fracture. The question — how does one allow oneself to believe the con? — is less important than the art and theater of the con itself. Or maybe the notion that art is itself a con and we women have been conning ourselves all along.”
— The Jewish Book Council
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“The True is Sarah Kornfeld’s personal exploration of grief and loss. What begins as an examination of a long-ago love affair masterfully propels into a page-turning thriller. Raised in the theater world Kornfeld plays right into the theatrics finding herself center stage struggling to decipher fact from fiction. A hauntingly beautiful tale of love, loss, politics, and art that dares us all not to look away from our own disillusionment. Culminating with a crash and return that reveals while the world perhaps is not as grand as it once was, love even in death, may be the only truth that lives on.”
—Courtney B. Vance, Tony and Emmy Award-winning Actor and Producer
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“I was happily swept away by the passion, politics, pace, humor, heart, and finely tuned skills Kornfeld brings to The True, her astonishing new book.”
—Lynn Crawford, author of Shankus & Kitto : A Saga and Paula Regossy
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“After I finished The True, I was left with questions about my own legacy and identity. Will I be remembered as one of the greats in my field? Will my name be mentioned long after I’m gone? I’ll never know, especially not in the deceptive and confusing world around us that Kornfeld illustrates through her brilliant contextualization of political and cultural events and movements in America. Compelling, passionate, and shocking, The True will remind readers that there is always a part to play in their own lives as well as the lives of others, and the characters and settings of our lives have more influence on us than we might have ever imagined.”
—Hannah French, Call Me Brackets (Literary Magazine) FULL REVIEW
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“Sarah Kornfeld's book The True is a fascinating trail of where grief can lead us.”
— Largehearted Boy ( Literature and music website that explores that spot in the venn diagram where the two arts overlap.)
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”The True is a gorgeously written twenty-first-century postmodern literary work convincing us that we only truly know where we are when on the wrong side of the looking glass. Passion, politics, lust, and theater drag us between the surreal and the real, on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a “now" age romance-political thriller.”
—September Williams, MD, Filmmaker, Author of the Chasing Mercury Toxic Trilogy
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“The True is a compelling, troubling, and painfully honest story about the world we live in now -- a world of fake news and alternative facts in which we believe what we want to believe and ignore or deny those nagging voices that tell us otherwise. It's also a story about theatre -- that most ancient art of dissembling; a world of artifice in which nothing is quite what it seems, but where deception is deployed in search of profound truths. And it is also a story about Romania, and about the twisted western view of that troubled eastern nation. Our narrator travels there in search of her undead lover, with Bucharest standing in for Transylvania, and bloodsuckers lurking at every turn. But in Kornfeld's deftly woven tale, there is sympathy even for the devil. The True lures the reader in with its dark poetry, and then refuses to let us go.”
— Stephen Scott-Bottoms, Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at University of Manchester and Author, “Playing Underground: A Critical History of 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement”
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“Intimate, funny, and page-turning, The True simultaneously expresses the ways in which we are haunted by memory and the ways we continue to con ourselves. What starts out as a love story that transcends time becomes a paean to the world of theater set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and crumbling Romania. This book has everything: romance, Ceaușescu, Diana Ross. Interwoven throughout, the terror and pathos of being Jewish in Europe. The long tail of the Holocaust, the (c)overt antisemitism that still comprises common parlance. What does it mean to be a Jew searching for a Jew? What is Jewish identity? What is identity? Kornfeld's lucid prose cuts close to the heart and lends an immediacy to the whole crazy story as we watch everything unravel. The downward spiral has such a tentacular pull. I couldn't put the book down!”
—Emily Stone, Author of Did Jew Know?
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“Storytelling is a contract of trust between speaker and listener—the promise that the suspension of disbelief will be rewarded with deeper truths encoded in fiction. But "in this time of virtual lives," Kornfeld warns, such trust is easier to manipulate than ever, and the magic of theater degenerates into propaganda and psychosis. Against the backdrop of Trump's threat to American democracy, she goes on a fever-dream of a journey to understand the death and legacy of her former lover and mentor, Romanian theater director Alexandru Darie, who believed art was the only defense against the greed and delusion of Ceausescu's dictatorship. But when she's elaborately scammed by a young woman claiming to be Darie's girlfriend, Kornfeld is humbled to discover how anyone, regardless of political beliefs or intellectual sophistication, can cling to wishful thinking as a defense against personal and historical trauma. The True is a funny, tragic, essential cautionary tale for our post-truth era.”
—Jendi Reiter, author of An Incomplete List of My Wishes: Stories