SARAH KORNFELD

“Imaginative, eloquent, poetic and profoundly insightful of how injured minds work, the entire book reads with like grace...In a word, inimitable. Gorgeous writing in a story that deserves our empathy and admiration. Very Highly Recommended.”

- Grady Harp, Top 100 Reviewer, Amazon and Art and Poetry Reviewer for POETS and ARTISTS magazine

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“What Stella Sees, Sarah Kornfeld’s complex debut novel is about perception. Young Stella is ill with a peculiar form of epilepsy, while her parents Rachel and Michael are in the throes of divorce. Stella’s seizures offer a kind of vision-state in which she is able to explore the ocean depths, discovering real and imagined creatures that educate her and inspire her art.

Sarah Kornfeld’s writing is frequently surprising and audacious, with passages of sustained brilliance. She is unafraid to report how people feel when they do not know it themselves; occasionally, she hints at a future with which they cannot possibly be acquainted. This is all excellent stuff, unafraid to “digress” or to break rules that are there to be broken.”

Jack Messenger, Independent Book Review, United Kingdom

Entire Review HERE

2019 INTERVIEW WITH JACK MESSENGER

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"This brilliant literary debut takes us on a lyrical journey into a unique mind. Stella's fertile brain comes as close as humanly possible to "art for art's sake", a perspective that her rather narcissistic parents, both art critics, barely even try to understand during their obsessive quest for a cure. . . Her pure motive of self-discovery contrasts with her parents' ego-driven genius. They are desperate to feel important or run from a traumatic past. Their genuine devotion is inextricably bound up with self-serving motives. The author's great talent (besides her gorgeous sentences) is to make you empathize with a character one moment, despise their selfishness the next and then hope against hope that their better nature will win out."

- Jendi Reiter, Acclaimed author and editor of  Winning Writers

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“Sarah Kornfeld's debut novel is a daring dive into a brave new sea. Like Stella, the writer possesses an uncanny visual sensitivity and a kaleidoscopic emotional range. Kornfeld's inventive storytelling transports the reader through Stella's illness and physical suffering to her liberating sensuality and autonomy. This novel's gripping filmic qualities will certainly inspire further iterations.”

- A.M. Hoch, Artist/Lee Krasner Awardee

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"Reading Sarah Kornfeld’s debut novel WHAT STELLA SEES is a fully immersive experience, like deep-sea diving. We not only see what Stella sees, we hear the people in her life so clearly as if they’re speaking all around us. We feel the intensities of raising a child in our speedy global world. Her voice is singular.  It cuts through the noise of our time to speak for so many of us, about the challenges of just being a body on a planet struggling for its survival. We’re able to see in her narrative both the burden of our toxic environment and the possibilities for transformation hidden in this burden, like a treasure chest found in a lost shipwreck. She leads us effortlessly through this otherness until it’s quiet enough to hear our own voices, and what sounds like the voice of our planet, crying out for meaning."

- Sarah Koskoff, Writer/Screenwriter for the film, "Hello I must be going" named on of the Top Ten Independent Films by the National Board of Review

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“WHAT STELLA SEES is a smart splash to the brain: primordial truths, cutting-edge medical science, a deep, layered story, wrapped in madly exquisite prose—simply put, Kornfeld supports the reality that water is some beautiful medicine you really should get addicted to.”

— Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, Marine Biologist & Author of New York Times Bestseller BLUE MIND

LINKS HERE TO PURCHASE ‘WHAT STELLA SEES’