A. M. Homes | |
---|---|
![]() A. M. Homes | |
Born | Washington, D.C., U.S. | December 18, 1961
Occupation |
|
Education | Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School American University Sarah Lawrence College (BA) Iowa Writers' Workshop (MFA) |
Period | 1989–present |
Notable works | The End of Alice (1996) |
Children | Juliet Homes |
Website | |
www |
Amy M. Homes (pen name A. M. Homes; born December 18, 1961 [1] ) is an American writer best known for her controversial novels and unusual short stories, which feature extreme situations and characters. Notably, her novel The End of Alice (1996) is about a convicted child molester and murderer.
Homes, who was adopted at birth, met her biological parents for the first time when she was 31, and published a memoir, The Mistress's Daughter (2007) about her exploration of her expanded "family". Her novel [update] May We Be Forgiven was published by Viking Books in 2012; its first chapter was published in the 100th issue of Granta (in 2008; edited by William Boyd), and was selected by Salman Rushdie for The Best American Short Stories 2008 . The novel won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2013. [2] Her newest novel, The Unfolding, was published by Viking on September 6, 2022.
Amy Michael Homes was born in 1961 in Washington, D.C. and given up for adoption. She was raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland and after graduating from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School she attended American University. [3]
Homes received her Bachelor of Arts in 1985 from Sarah Lawrence College, [4] where she studied with the author Grace Paley. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. [5]
Homes has written both short stories and novels; the former published in leading magazines such as Granta, The New Yorker , McSweeney's, and BOMB .
She wrote her first novel, Jack , when she was 19; it was published in 1989 when she was 28, after she had published some short stories. An exploration of family life and sexuality, it features a boy with divorced parents who learns that his father is gay. The book was critically praised and is still featured in school and college reading lists. [6] Homes wrote a screenplay to adapt it as a film by the same name, produced in 2004 for the cable network Showtime.
Her second novel was In a Country of Mothers (1993). It centered around a therapist and a girl patient who was adopted; the therapist begins to think the girl might be her own daughter, whom she had given up at birth. [6] (Homes was writing this novel and it was in production before her own birth mother tracked her down in 1992.)
Homes' 1996 novel, The End of Alice, is narrated mostly by a convicted child molester and murderer imprisoned in the West Block of Sing Sing. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham described this work as
"dark and treacherous as ice on a highway. It establishes A. M. Homes as one of the bravest, most terrifying writers working today. She never plays it safe, and it begins to look as if she can do almost anything."[ citation needed ]
It aroused considerable controversy and received mixed reviews because of its subject matter and objectionable protagonists; in the UK, bookseller W.H. Smith refused to carry it. [7]
Homes published the first chapter of her 1999 novel Music for Torching as a short story in The New Yorker. The novel features characters who appeared in the short stories of her first collection, The Safety of Objects. It features a suburban couple who deliberately burn their house down. Jill Adams in The Barcelona Review described it as having Homes' "trademark style of wry humor applied to the uncanny dissection of suburbia’s facade." [6] Britain's The Observer found it "immensely disturbing". [8] People magazine called the novel "haunting" [9] and Gary Krist in The New York Times described it as a
"nasty and willfully grotesque novel. The fact is, I was at times appalled by the book, annoyed by it, angered by it. Its ending struck me as cynical and manipulative. But even so, I found myself rapt from beginning to end, fascinated by Homes's single-minded talent for provocation." [7]
He concluded with a caveat: "In her last two novels, the desire to outrage is so conspicuous that it risks obscuring her powerful gifts as a novelist." [7]
Her novel, This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), was set in Los Angeles; it satirized upper-class residents and the city's culture. It featured "a rich, isolated man who suffers a physical crisis and goes on a wild compassion spree." [10] The Guardian said that "it was kitschy and bordered on the inane, but there was something appealing about its mixture of the apocalyptic and the perkily upbeat, caught nicely by John Waters when he said: 'If Oprah went insane, this might be her favourite book.'" [10]
With May We Be Forgiven (2012), Homes returned to a setting in Westchester County, New York, the region described in several of her novels. Packed with violent, emotional incident in the first chapter, it won the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), awarded in the United Kingdom. [2] The Guardian review described it as "a novel about forgiveness, family, intimacy, consumerism and the myth of success." [11] The reviewer said, "AM Homes can't really be compared to any other writer; no one else is quite as dark and funny and elegant all at the same time." [11]
In 1990, Homes's first short-story collection, The Safety of Objects , was published. Writing in The Los Angeles Times , Amy Hempel wrote: "Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting the details right." [12] The book was adapted as an independent feature film of the same name, released in 2001 and starring Glenn Close, among others. [13] Homes co-wrote the screenplay together with the director, Rose Troche.
Writing in The Guardian in 2003, the writer Ali Smith described Homes' second short story collection, Things You Should Know, as "funny and glinting and masterful, light as air, strange as a dream, monstrous as truth: the real and classic thing." [14]
Her third collection of stories, Days of Awe, was published in 2018. [15]
Homes' articles and essays are published in magazines such as The New Yorker , Artforum , Vanity Fair , and McSweeney's , among others. She has also been a contributing editor to BOMB since 1995, where she has published articles and interviews with various artists and writers, including Eric Fischl, Tobias Wolff, and Adam Bartos. [16]
In 2004, The New Yorker published "The Mistress's Daughter", her essay about meeting her biological parents for the first time at age 31; unmarried when she was born, they had immediately surrendered her for adoption. [17] She expanded the essay about exploration of her "family" members and published her memoir in 2007. [18]
Homes wrote for season two of the television drama series, The L Word, and produced season three. She developed an HBO series, The Hamptons about the resort towns along the ocean on eastern Long Island, which she described as "a cross between Desperate Housewives and Grapes of Wrath ."[ citation needed ]
Since 2010, Homes has been developing television pilots for CBS with Timberman/Beverly Productions. In 2013 she was developing Koethi Zan's best-selling novel, The Never List, as a dramatic series for CBS television. [19] Homes was a writer and co-executive producer on the 2017 USA series Falling Water, and also a writer and co-executive producer on the Stephen King series Mr. Mercedes , which was developed by David E. Kelley. [20]
Homes lives in New York City with her daughter, Juliet, born in March 2003. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia University, The New School, and New York University. [21] In 2008 she began teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.
In her memoir The Mistress's Daughter, Homes describes meeting her birth parents for the first time when she was 31. They were unmarried when she was born and put her up for adoption. Her birth mother Ellen Ballman was having an affair with her much older, married boss Norman Hecht when she became pregnant. Ballman initiated contact with Homes in hopes that her daughter might donate a kidney to her. Homes also met the members of her father's "legal" family. [17] [22]
Asked about her sexuality, Homes said in an April 2007 interview in The Washington Post , "I've dated men and I've dated women and there's no more or less to it than that." [23] [24] In an interview with Diva magazine, she said, "I am bisexual, but I wouldn't necessarily define myself that way." [25]
Once a guest artist at the artists' collective Yaddo, Homes was named as its co-chairwoman with Susan Unterberg in 2013. On this, she stated, "Without Yaddo, I wouldn't exist as a writer. Yaddo gives artists the increasingly rare gift of a time and place to do one's work, suspended from the intrusive buzz of the every day. I am forever indebted." [26]
Homes has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, [27] a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship from the New York Public Library, New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. Her work has been translated into 22 languages.[ citation needed ]
In June 2013, she won the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction [2] (formerly named the Orange Prize for Fiction) for her novel May We Be Forgiven (2012).
![]() |
Amy Ruth Tan is an American author best known for her novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), which was adapted into a 1993 film. She is also known for other novels, short story collections, children's books, and a memoir.
Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Her writing career spanned over two decades, during which she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020.
Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.
Donna Louise Tartt is an American novelist and essayist. Her novels are The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013), which has been adapted into a 2019 film of the same name She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.
Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer.
Lionel Shriver is an American author and journalist who lives in Portugal. Her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Elizabeth Strout is an American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her nine novels.
Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named Russell a 5 under 35 honoree. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015–2018) and winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), she has published eight novels, many short stories, and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Her essays on literary themes have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and she writes for the books pages of The Irish Times and The Guardian. Her fiction explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
Deborah Levy is a British novelist, playwright and poet. She initially concentrated on writing for the theatre – her plays were staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company – before focusing on prose fiction. Her early novels included Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, and Billy & Girl. Her more recent fiction has included the Booker-shortlisted novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk, as well as the Booker-longlisted The Man Who Saw Everything, and the short-story collection Black Vodka.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works. Time magazine called Ferrante one of the 100 most influential people in 2016.
May We Be Forgiven is a 2012 novel by American writer A. M. Homes. It won the 2013 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moshfegh's subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona.