In-Store: Vanessa Lawrence: Sheer w/ Carolyn Ferrell

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/cFJMy_PhQMU
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

An electrifying, propulsive novel about the rise and fall of a controversial beauty mogul and the moral gray areas at the intersections of beauty, power, and ambition.

It’s 2015 and Maxine Thomas, the founder and creative director of the cult makeup company Reveal, has just been suspended by her own Board for a scandalous transgression. Housebound in her New York City apartment where she awaits the verdict on her future, Max recounts her version of the events that have brought her to this moment.

From her start as a precocious suburban child in the eighties to her decades as a workaholic visionary, Max proselytizes a sheer, dewy look—cosmetics through a female gaze—all while battling sexist investors, the whiplash of cultural change, and the mounting pressure to keep her sexuality a secret. But when Max’s story catches up to her present, she must contend with the cost of true transparency.

Told over nine intense days yet spanning a lifetime, Sheer is a gripping, incisive, and provocative tale of a complicated female vanguard’s insatiable drive and the slippery ground between empowerment and abuse of power.

Vanessa Lawrence is a writer, editor, and native New Yorker. Her debut novel, Ellipses, was named a best book of 2024 by Vogue and a most anticipated book of the year by ELLE, Electric Literature, and Autostraddle. For nearly two decades she covered the arts, fashion, beauty, design, and New York society as a staff writer for publications including Women’s Wear Daily and W Magazine. She has a BA in history from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the novel Dear Miss Metropolitan (Holt, 2021) which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her story collection Don’t Erase Me was awarded the 1997 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Ferrell's stories and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2018 and The Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Roxane Gay and Curtis Sittenfeld, respectively; The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike; and Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor. She is the recipient of awards from the Fulbright Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo and MacDowell. Carolyn Ferrell teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Books Are Magic