Binary Star

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize

A new paperback edition of the debut novel by award-winning author, Sarah Gerard--an intense, elegiac portrait of two young lovers as they battle personal afflictions and traverse the American countryside.

Features a new introduction by Catherine Lacey.

"A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way." --Jenny Offill

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.

With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road-trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they've found a direction.

Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success.

Author: Sarah Gerard
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 05/12/2026
Pages: 184
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 7.49h x 5.36w x 0.48d
ISBN: 9781953387554

About the Author
SARAH GERARD is the author of the memoir Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable. Her essay collection Sunshine State was a New York Times Critics' and NPR Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. Her novel Binary Star was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction prize, and her novel True Love is "[A] darkly comic dissection of desire" (Entertainment Weekly). Her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, McSweeney's, The Believer, Vice, Electric Literature, and several anthologies. She was a recipient of a 2021 Lambda Literary Dr. James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. She's a private investigator in Denver.

CATHERINE LACEY is the author of five books: Biography of X, Pew, The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing, and a short story collection, Certain American States. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Cullman fellowship, an O. Henry, the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and an award from Lambda for Lesbian Fiction. Her debut work of nonfiction, The Möbius Book, is forthcoming from FSG. A second short story collection, My Stalkers, will follow. She lives in México with her husband, Daniel Saldaña París.