Author C.J. Hribal was in love, so he asked his love to marry him. She was a sharp-witted, one-hundred-watt-smile woman, a mother, an academic and a cancer warrior. She had also just been re-diagnosed with cancer after five years of remission. “Officially, I asked her to marry me after she got her re-diagnosis. I knew…
They say if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. That’s what Sarah-Jane McKenna did when she wrote her first novel, Dreaming in Irish. McKenna said that she wasn’t seeing the types of stories she wanted to read. “Everyone I know, their life is going in cycles and changing and I wasn’t…
Pay close enough attention, and you’ll notice that many writers have themes they return to. Stephen King writes frequently about weak characters who are victims of stronger ones. Jodi Picoult writes about family issues, often involving a court of law. Then there’s Fredrik Backman, a Swedish author who comes back to the theme of belonging,…
For author Hannah Orenstein, matchmaking is more than a job she did for a few months in college. It’s also the premise of her first novel, Playing with Matches. The novel is about Sasha Goldberg, a recent NYU graduate who unexpectedly lands a job as a matchmaker at a dating agency. She has a boyfriend,…
Randy Susan Meyers found the subject for her latest novel in the morning news. She read about an immense Ponzi scheme that effected thousands across the nation and realized she could tell the story the right way. Her bones resonated sympathetically with the notes plucked by the subject matter. So that’s what she did. The…
Sonya Larson didn’t set out to write “Gabe Dove,” one of the stories chosen by Meg Wolitzer for inclusion in TheBest American Short Stories 2017, differently than her previous stories. But circumstances forced her hand. “I was in a state of exhaustion. I had no more ideas.” Her job was demanding 10 and 12 hour…
In American vernacular, we often call a shameful or troubling past, “buried.” We know there’s some unfortunate event left unspoken, and to bring up those bodies is messy and largely unwanted. Instead, an order arranges itself around the unspoken, and we get used to the roles and assumptions needed to carry on with the silence….
An American Marriage is a book about the unexpected devastation of a family. Celestial is a young newlywed dreaming of life with her husband, Roy. That future is ripped away from them unexpectedly when Roy, a young black man, is wrongfully accused and convicted of rape. With less than two years of marriage under their…
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