Frontier:

LitHub Notable Small Press Book of 2025

Chicago Review of Books Best Debuts of 2025 Selection

Jewish Women’s Archive Book Club Pick

 “If Stern’s book sounds like nothing you’ve ever encountered before, that’s likely because it is . . . Stern’s story is a welcome and necessary contribution to the conversation around birth at a time when the dangers of bearing children feel especially pressing . . . . [A] book that holds the holiness and the dangers of childbirth in tension, making a strong case that everyone to whom birth is relevant—which is to say, everyone—should do the same.’
—Corinne Cordasco-Pak, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Stern performs literary alchemy. She creates a hybrid form—part memoir, part ghost story, part research, part critique—that holds what conventional narrative cannot. The book itself becomes a frontier, an experimental space where multiple genres coexist to capture a maternal experience that exceeds any single mode of telling . . . .In a literary landscape rich with motherhood narratives, Stern’s work stands apart—raw, intellectually rigorous, and formally inventive.”
—Rebecca Powell, Zona Motel

 
“Erica Stern’s hybrid memoir, Frontier, is many things: a searing critique of the narratives our culture feeds expectant parents; an indictment of how outdated beliefs still shape birth and maternal health; and a meditation on how women, in the most vulnerable of moments, can feel like ghosts in the system.”
—Melissa Rampelli, Psychology Today

As she prepared to give birth to her first child, Erica Stern envisioned the idyllic experience promised by prenatal classes and diaper commercials. But when unexpected complications arose during labor, she found herself at the threshold of life and death, a liminal space that connected her to generations of mothers before her.

From the chaos of the delivery room, Frontier opens into a parallel narrative: a Wild West ghost story. There, a mother who didn’t survive the ordeal of childbirth roams her old homestead, tethered to the family she left behind. In this otherworldly hybrid memoir, Stern careens between this haunted past and the present horror of the hospital as she waits for her own son to wake up in the NICU.

Seamlessly blending memoir, fiction, and research into the fraught history of birth—from midwives to Victorian-era sedation through the Natural Childbirth Movement and modern L&D suites—Frontier lays bare visceral truths that are too often glossed over, and offers an incisive look at the momentous and terrifying transformations of motherhood.

More praise for Frontier:

“The genius of Frontier is the way Stern masterfully wields genre tropes—ghost story, gothic, horror, western—to go where a more straightforward birth memoir couldn’t, revealing how a traumatic birth is like a haunting and that the same hubris behind the project of the American West is what the fathers of modern gynecology brought to the sublime wilderness of birth.”
—Shayne Terry, Lithub

“Eri­ca Stern’s new book . . . fear­less­ly push­es the lim­its of thought, struc­ture, and craft. In Fron­tier: a Mem­oir and a Ghost Sto­ry, Stern mas­ter­ful­ly tells two sto­ries — or two visions of one . . . a bril­liant exam­ple of form mir­ror­ing con­tent.”
—Diane Gottlieb, Jewish Book Council

 “Frontier belongs on a shelf with books like Homing Instincts and Ordinary Insanity by Sarah Menkedeck; Near Breathing by Kathryn Rhett; Hysterical by Elisa Bassist; and Lady Parts by Deborah Copaken.”
—Melanie Powell, River Teeth

“Essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the industrialized birth industry.”
— Rachel León, Chicago Review of Books

“Frontier is a viscerally important read connecting generations of mothers and writers from the past to today.”
—Leslie Lindsay, Hippocampus

“Frontier is as mesmerizing a work of imagination as it is a heart-stoppingly generous memoir as it is a rigorous feat of journalism and theology. At every surprising, finely crafted level, Erica Stern invites us to expand our understanding of the profound, dangerous, and ultimately endless transition from person to parent. An important and beautiful book that spoke to the unnameable parts of my own soul.”
—Katie Gutierrez, bestselling author of More Than You'll Ever Know

“Frontier gives readers a clear-eyed view into the wilderness of labor and delivery. With a beautifully innovative blend of memoir and fiction, Erica Stern is a steady guide through her own harrowing journey while also capturing the feelings of exile so many of us encounter as we enter new motherhood.”
—Teresa Wong, author of Dear Scarlet

“In Frontier, Stern does something as rare as it is remarkable: she expresses the emotional, psychological, and physical aspects of birth that often feel beyond language.”
—Rachel Somerstein, author of Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section

“A raw, contemplative exploration of the border between motherhood and not, Frontier takes one singular, harrowing experience of childbirth and the postpartum period and makes it universal. In open-hearted, gorgeous prose, Erica Stern makes meaning out of accident and luck, exploring medical history, religious ritual, and the ghostly multiverse that binds the two together. Vulnerable, wise, and truly a feat.”
—Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House