Grand Rapids
A new novel from the celebrated author of Surveys, set in the Michigan suburbs of the early 2000s.

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.
1146817398
Grand Rapids
A new novel from the celebrated author of Surveys, set in the Michigan suburbs of the early 2000s.

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.
17.95 Pre Order
Grand Rapids

Grand Rapids

by Natasha Stagg
Grand Rapids

Grand Rapids

by Natasha Stagg

Paperback

$17.95 
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    Available for Pre-Order. This item will be released on September 30, 2025

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Overview

A new novel from the celebrated author of Surveys, set in the Michigan suburbs of the early 2000s.

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder’s public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001—the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781635902570
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 09/30/2025
Series: Semiotext(e) / Native Agents
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Natasha Stagg is the author of Surveys: A Novel (2016), Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 (2019), and Artless: Stories 2019–2023 (2023). She lives in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Imagine a teenage wasteland in the Midwest, a girl mired in loss there as if trapped in ‘an absurdist prison.’ After the loss of her mother—‘Her life is gone; your life is changed’—and of her home, the girl is stuck and stalled, the sordid exploits of adolescence portrayed with philosophy and without self-pity. Brave, kind of dazzling, intriguing, and elegant."
—Nancy Lemann, author of Lives of the Saints

"Stagg has the gift of projecting her prose so it seems to come from nowhere. Grand Rapids sounds like summer radio or opening a door to an empty room and discovering a voice still echoing around inside it. Reading it reminded me of failing to find your face in a high school yearbook, or seeing it in someone else’s: a novel that could have, maybe, happened to you, too.”
—Olivia Kan-Sperling, author of Little Pink Book

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