Kathleen Alcott | |
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Born | October 17, 1988 |
Nationality | American |
Kathleen Alcott (born October 17, 1988) is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist from Northern California. She has taught Creative Writing and Literature at Columbia University and Bennington College. Her work has been translated into Dutch, Italian, Korean, French, Turkish, and Chinese. [1]
Alcott has published three novels. The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (2012), a Bildungsroman, was called "a joyously good first novel" by the Wall Street Journal. [2]
Her followup, Infinite Home (2015), deals with the housing shortage in New York City [3] and with Williams syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes an abnormally outgoing personality in those afflicted. [4] The novel was shortlisted for The Chautuaqua Prize and nominated for The Kirkus Prize.
Her third novel, America Was Hard to Find (2019), an epic loosely centered on space travel between Sputnik (1957) and the Challenger disaster (1986), was noted for its "sprawling" historical scope, its multifaceted cultural critique of the United States, and it frank treatment of feminism, [5] countercultural radicalism, and the AIDS crisis. [6] The New Yorker stated that the book "displays a sure-handed lyricism—from the lunar surface, the sky appears 'glossy like a baby girl’s church shoes'—but its energy lies in its skepticism about the American century and the parallels the author finds between contradictory currents." [7]
In 2017, Alcott's short story "Reputation Management" was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. [8] Her story "Natural Light," first appearing in Zoetrope , was selected for inclusion in the 2019 Best American Short Stories anthology.
In 2018, Alcott was chosen to be a Fellow at The Macdowell Colony. [9]
Among her varied nonfiction, Alcott's culinary writing is noteworthy for its mingling of memoir and literary criticism. [10] For the Paris Review she has profiled the use of food in James Salter's fiction. [11] From 2015 to 2018 she contributed a food column to The Guardian.
Though described as being firmly in the "realist" mode, Alcott makes strategic use of figurative language to suggest psychological states. [12] Anthony Doerr writes that her “prose […] is always trending away from straightforward clarity toward something more interesting.” [13] In a commentary on the care required to balance this clarity with more figurative language, the narrator of Alcott's story “Natural Light,” a professor of creative writing, wonders
how close a simile should get to the character’s actual life and circumstances: in comparing her inner sadness to the color of her dress, weren’t we depriving the reader of some useful speculative distance? [14]
Alcott's method relies heavily on primary research. For her depiction of a rare neurological condition in Infinite Home, she interviewed people with Williams syndrome. [15] To describe the 1969 Apollo landing in America Was Hard to Find, Alcott conducted what would be one of astronaut Alan Bean's final interviews. [16]
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The Best American Short Stories of 2015, Notable (2015) The Chautauqua Prize Shortlist (2016) The Kirkus Prize Nominee (2016) The Sunday Times Short Story Award, Shortlist (2017) MacDowell Colony Fellow (2018) The Best American Short Stories of 2019, The Sunday Times Short Story Award, Longlist (2019) Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, LongList (2020)
Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The Best American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of The Best American Series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in contemporary American literature.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
The Best American Short Stories 2007, a volume in The Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor Stephen King.
The Best American Short Stories 2010, a volume in The Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor Richard Russo.
The Best American Short Stories 2011, a volume in the Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor Geraldine Brooks.
The Best American Short Stories 2012, a volume in the Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor Tom Perotta.
Sharon Solwitz is a fiction writer and professor based in Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of the short story collection Blood and Milk and the novels Bloody Mary and Once, in Lourdes. Tom Perotta and Heidi Pitlor selected her story "Alive" for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2012, and her story "Gifted" was chosen for the 2016 collection. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1991, and teaches creative writing at Purdue University.
All the Light We Cannot See is a 2014 war novel by American author Anthony Doerr. The novel is set during World War II. It revolves around the characters Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl who takes refuge in her great-uncle's house in Saint-Malo after Paris is invaded by Nazi Germany, and Werner Pfennig, a bright German boy who is accepted into a military school because of his skills in radio technology. The book alternates between paralleling chapters depicting Marie-Laure and Werner, framed with a nonlinear structure. The novel has a lyrical writing style, with critics noting extensive sensory details. The story has ethical themes, portraying the destructive nature of war and Doerr's fascination with science and nature.
The Best American Short Stories 2013, a volume in the Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor Elizabeth Strout.
Jami Attenberg is an American fiction writer and essayist. She is the author of a short story collection, six novels, including the best-seller The Middlesteins (2012), and a memoir, I Came All ThisWay to Meet You (2022).
Weike Wang is a Chinese-American author of the novel Chemistry, which won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award.
Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer. She is the author of The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and in 2017, Granta Magazine named her to its decennial list of the Best of Young American Novelists.
Patricia Engel is a Colombian-American writer, professor of creative writing at the University of Miami, and author of five books, including Vida, which was a PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award Finalist and winner of the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, Colombia's national prize in literature. She was the first woman, and Vida the first book in translation, to receive the prize.
The Best American Short Stories 2014, a volume in the Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor Jennifer Egan.
The Best American Short Stories 2015, a volume in the Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor T. C. Boyle.
The Best American Short Stories 2016, a volume in the Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor Junot Díaz.
The Best American Short Stories 2018, a volume in the Best American Short Stories series, was edited by Heidi Pitlor and by guest editor Roxane Gay.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 is a volume in the annual Best American Short Stories anthology. It was edited by the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, and guest editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, Anthony Doerr.
The Best American Short Stories 2020 is a volume in the annual Best American Short Stories anthology. It was edited by the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, and guest editor Curtis Sittenfeld.