New York Times Book Review has weighed in! Curtis Sittenfeld reviews Little Known Facts - front cover, 2/24 issue; read online here.
Editor's Choice - Chicago Tribune, 2/24
Editor's Choice - New York Times, 3/3
The Chicago Public Library Foundation recently announced its Carl Sandburg and 21st Century Award recipients for 2013. On October 23, Isabel Allende and Michael Lewis will be given Carl Sandburg Awards, and I will be the 21st Century Award recipient. I'm very honored!
Thursday, 3/28 segment on The Morning Blend, Milwaukee's NBC affiliate WTMJ, here.
Kirkus Reviews ran a feature article about Little Known Facts recently too, which you can access here.
Publication day, February 12 - also Judy Blume's birthday, Mardi Gras, and...my second book, a novel titled Little Known Facts, has been published by Bloomsbury USA. It was also published in the UK in January under the new Bloomsbury Circus imprint. Read the starred Booklist review here. You can also read the Kirkus Reviews notice here. (Booklist's review is available on their site in full-text format, but Kirkus's is not. I've posted both reviews at the underscored link above, which directs you to the "Reviews" page here.)
Very fun Book Notes feature on Larghearted Boy here.
A Time Out Chicago feature by Laura Pearson here.
A Q & A with MSN.com's book critic Mary Pols here.
A second Q & A with Newcity's book critic Naomi Huffman can be read here.
A third Q & A with Aspen Matis for Tin House can be read here.
Now for a tangent: I'll be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books to take part in a panel led by Chicago Tribune Books Editor Elizabeth Taylor, 3:30 p.m., Saturday, 4/20, USC campus, with three other novelists: Karen Bender, Jonathan Evison, and Bruce Bauman.
Little Known Facts focuses on a family in Los Angeles. The father, Renn Ivins, is a film star whose fame and success overshadow the lives of his two grown children, a son and a daughter, in ways that make it difficult for them to achieve personal and professional successes of their own. More information is available in this blog post. And a fun podcast that the producers of All Write Already, Willy Nast and Karen Shimmin, put together recently - some of their writing resolutions for the new year start it off, followed by me reading an excerpt of Little Known Facts before our discussion about the book and related topics.
Bloomsbury has also published paperback and e-book editions of my story collection Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, which won the Grace Paley Prize in 2009, Ploughshares' Zacharis Award for a first book, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
The 2012 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories Anthology is now available as both an e-book and in hard copy. A story of mine published by the New England Review in Winter 2010-11, "The First Wife," is among the 20 stories selected for inclusion. Stories by Yiyun Li, Alice Munro, John Berger, Salvatore Scibona, Miroslav Penkov, Lauren Groff, and 13 others are also included.
I keep an author page on Facebook. Please consider taking a look and hitting the "like" button.
The Chicago Writers Association chose my story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, as the Book of the Year in the traditionally published fiction category. Below are two photos, the second with Randy Richardson, director of the Chicago Writers Association, from the awards ceremony, which took place on January 14, 2012, at the Book Cellar, an independent bookstore in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago.
The Chicago Tribune's Bill Hageman's January 2012 "Remarkable Woman" column, which is published in the Sunday magazine each week. It was an honor to be among the other women who have been profiled here since this column debuted in 2010. The full article is here.
Storyville, an excellent app for iPads and iPhones, which The New Yorker recently chose as a Digital Pick of the Week, has published my story "Quality of Life" as its selection of the week - December 27, 2011. Consider subscribing ($4.99/six months, 48 stories/year) through the iTunes/iPhone app store - a new story each week from writers such as Jennifer Egan, Charles Baxter, Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah, Mavis Gallant, Joe Meno, Belle Boggs, Patrick Somerville...
A recent interview about Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, conducted by the funny and lovely Aspen Matis for NYC's 12th Street Online.
Ploughshares literary journal has awarded Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry the 2011 John C. Zacharis Award, an annual prize for a first book by a Ploughshares contributor. The prize alternates between poetry and fiction each year. Akshay Ahuja, one of the MFA fiction students at Emerson College, where Ploughshares is based, interviewed me over the summer, after I learned that my book had won the award. The transcript of the interview can be read here.
For Ex-Libris, DePaul University's English department newsletter, graduate student Maria Hlohowskyj recently wrote an article about Portraits of... You can access the article here.
New stories:
"Flattering Light" is in the spring 2012 issue of The Southern Review. A jealous son, a famous father, a confused young woman...
"Relations" was published in the winter 2012 issue of The Southern Review. This story concerns a successful Hollywood actor and the effects of his fame on his two ex-wives and his two grown children, especially his son.
"Ladylike," a story about two actresses, one young, the other middle-aged, both successful, is in the current issue of Barrelhouse, issue #10.
"The Goddess Complex," the first chapter of a novel-in-progress, is in the Summer/Fall 2011 issue of Notre Dame Review. The main character is a young woman who has just begun her freshman year of college and falls for a guy she knows she shouldn't want but does anyway.
"Litany: Four Men," is in the summer 2011 issue of Massachusetts Review, a four-part story about angry men in the modern world.
"Beach Vacation," is out in the summer 2011 issue of The Southern Review, a story about a mother and teenage son vacationing on Captiva Island, FL, and the arguments and recriminations that ensue when the mother realizes just how much attention her son is attracting from the ladies, some quite a bit older than he is.
"The River," is in the summer 2011 issue of TriQuarterly Online, a story about a teenaged girl witnessing the demise of her parents' marriage, in an economically strapped Wisconsin mill town.
"Roger Weber Would Like to Stay," spring 2011 issue of The Literary Review, a story about a woman who flirts with a charming ghost, but soon things get a little complicated...
"Fortune," in storySouth, Issue #31, Spring 2011, a story about a man who realizes that he can profit from the gullible by telling their fortunes, but then he must cope with the fact that he seems to have the frightening ability to make accurate predictions.
"The Prettiest Girls," in the Winter 2010-11 issue of Ploughshares: a story about a man who works for a Hollywood film studio. He falls for a young Mexican woman and brings her back to California. Happily ever after? Well...
"Twelve + Twelve," a story about a woman and a man, love, car wrecks, a 24-year age difference, in Glimmer Train, #76. Read it and weep? (No, but maybe you'll like it.)
"Student, Teacher," a story about a college professor, a bodyguard, and a film star who has decided at age 32 to go back to college, is out in Pleiades, #30.2.
"Passion!" a young man, several women, romantic turmoil and even a few styrofoam heads with wigs on them! In New South, Summer 2010, Vol. 3, #2.
"Interview with the Second Wife," available in full-text format at the New England Review site, Vol. 30, #4. This story was also one of the 100 distinguished short stories named in The Best American Short Stories 2011.
Read an interview with Christine regarding the Chicago Cubs and her contribution to an anthology of Cubs-related prose, artwork and poetry: Cubbie Blues.
(An enormous thanks to Randy Richardson for his invaluable help establishing and maintaining this site).