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Look a little ways down the column at the right side of any page on this site and you’ll see a link to my new(ish) Instagram account, as well as a two-photo preview of what I’ve been posting. Click on it, and I’ll see you there! To get to my…(Read More)
Double win!
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An Unexpected Guest made an unexpected appearance in an art installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as well as on the blog of the Indianapolis Public Library, which wrote, “Korkeakivi’s novel moves smoothly while giving the reader a cagey look at diplomatic life after 9/11.” To read the whole book review as…(Read More)
Strands from William Blake’s poetry run through Nobel Prize Laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age, first published in Japan in 1983. In this beautiful and idiosyncratic autobiographical novel, about a highly cerebral author named “K” and his mentally disabled eldest son (Kenzaburo’s eldest son experienced irreversible…(Read More)
The reader of Joanna Rakoff’s charming memoir, My Salinger Year (2014), needn’t be a devotee of the famously reclusive, eponymous author to love. Rakoff herself hadn’t read J.D. Salinger’s work when she began her entry-level job at his literary agency, charged with scrutinizing (for potential craziness) and then throwing…(Read More)
Mister Pip
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On Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea during the early 1990s, as civil war rages, the only remaining white-skinned inhabitant in a simple fishing village takes over as schoolmaster, using Great Expectations by Charles Dickens as his textbook. Told through the eyes of a local thirteen-year-old girl, Mister Pip (2006), by New…(Read More)
Choosing a title always takes a little time (at least for this writer). Happy to announce SHINING SEA, coming from Little, Brown in 2016…(Read More)
This makes me happy: My new novel, An American Family, will come out from Little, Brown & Co. in 2016. Same house, same fab editor! More info to come, but the publishing announcement describes what the novel is about like this. The story spans from 1962 to the present, and southern California to the Inner…(Read More)
In the Alps
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I’ll be a guest author during the Mount Blanc Writing Workshops, giving a reading on the evening of June 23* and chatting with students. The workshop instructors are fabulous – Cheryl Strayed, Pam Houston, Ann Hood, Alexander Chee, Erin Belieu, Alan Heathcock, and program director Michael Dahlie – and the setting and workshop ambiance dreamy.…(Read More)
Delighted to say Geneva, where I spend much of the year, will be getting a new place to find English-language books. To be more specific, Payot Libraire is consolidating two smaller locales into one beautiful airy four-storey shop right in the city center, which will include a café, a Nature & Découvertes…(Read More)
Dans le café de jeunesse perdu (2007) was the first work by Modiano I ever read, which may influence my partiality for it. All the classic Modiano elements are there: the mysterious woman; the flux of identity; the inescapability of the past; the interplay of locale with story. And, of course, Modiano’s distinctive voice…(Read More)
