Mairead Small Staid

The Traces is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Venice, drawing on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, and spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson, The Traces is an ecstatic, insightful, and original debut.

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Available now from your favorite bookstore or mine.

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“A stunning exploration of happiness and memory. These brilliant, beautiful essays challenged and delighted me. A transcendent debut.” — Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half

“Lyric and enigmatic, The Traces hints at every turn some imminent parting of the veils. Mairead Small Staid wraps her personal narrative in rich speculative cloth. Italy crowds the senses. Reading, I remembered my delight as a child watching iron filings moving slowly into design as the magnet approached the sheet of paper from below.” — Sven Birkerts, author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

“Mairead Small Staid is an exceptionally delightful critic, with a lavish, forceful intellect and a style marked by cross-disciplinary ignition and pointillistic grace. In The Traces, which is the kind of book that’ll be passed around like a good secret, she pursues happiness as a magic aberration, fraught and consequential. Immortalizing one golden season in Florence, she captures the flux of her own personhood and potential—and ours, too—under the influence of time, art, weather, love, and chance.” — Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

“Staid plumbs her travels in Italy as a college student to examine ‘happiness, both intensive and sustained’ in her beautiful debut… Staid’s evocative prose and insightful analysis are tough to forget. Readers will be eager to see where she goes next.” — Publishers Weekly (starred)

“The Traces… is astonishingly good. It’s a swim in a deep body of water, serene yet almost electric with life… Staid’s vast critical range is on display here, turning what could be merely a memoir or travelogue into a wide-ranging treatise on beauty and distance, desire and memory, and the pursuit of and reflection on that nebulous thing called happiness… Gorgeous on every level, The Traces is perfect for readers who dream of wine-soaked sunsets on distant coasts and who value art, architecture and literature. It is for those who trust that awe and beauty are for everyone–and can be found anywhere.” — Shelf Awareness (starred)

“[E]xceptional… an intellectually rigorous rebuttal… The Traces is a place I will revisit often.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Staid immerses the reader in her fresh, vivid inquiry… I found these connections deeply impressive. The Traces worked my mind in new ways as it followed fibers of art and philosophy that Staid so deftly weaves among her journeys.” — Barrelhouse

“Italy is a captivating pretext for the author’s melancholic reflections about happiness and its opposite, reflections that magnificently cascade in all directions, chapter after chapter… [The Traces] should be savored slowly. Unafraid of repeating or contradicting herself, Small Staid accesses some existential truths.” — Full Stop

“It is the written equivalent of those magicians who reveal how the trick they have just performed is done: the illusion is still just as amazing even if we have been shown the mechanics of it all. The Traces tells and deconstructs a complex story of one person’s happiness, woven from all sorts of creative material. It is one of the most inventive essays and best books I have ever read.” — Tears in the Fence