(Sources: Official Biography and Wikipedia): Jessica Bruder was born in Clifton, New Jersey. She graduated from Amherst College in 2000, majoring in English and French, and received a master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2005. She has worked as a Starbucks barista, a snowboarder, an "electric guitar nerd," a music store clerk, a junior camp counselor and a waitress.
She now teaches narrative storytelling at Columbia University. She has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, WIRED, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine and The Guardian. She was a staff reporter at The Oregonian. Her photography appears in Nomadland and her first book, Burning Book, and has been published by The New York Times, The New York Observer and Blender magazine. She is currently writing about trust in the age of surveillance.
"For her book Nomadland, she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in a precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving — from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border. Named a New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice, Nomadland won the 2017 Discover Award and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Helen Bernstein Book Award."
In the video below, Jessica Bruder discusses Nomadland with Chris Hedges.
In addition to writing Nomadland, Jessica Bruder was also executive producer on a film about "CamperForce," a documentary about retirees working for Amazon.
Footage from "CamperForce" was also used on segment of John Oliver's HBO news commentary/comedy show, "Last Week Tonight." (warning swears and raunchy humor).
Synopsis: When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. She comes dangerously close to unraveling, but while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.
Sigrid Nunez is the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College (1972) and her MFA from Columbia University (1975). After finishing school she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. Nunez is currently writer in residence at Boston University and has taught at several other schools including Amherst College, Columbia University, the New School, Princeton University, and Smith College. She lives in Manhattan.
Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer and newyorker.com. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories has been selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Nunez’s work has been translated into nine languages and is in the process of being translated into fourteen more.
Sigrid’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Beginning in fall, 2019, she will be writer in residence at Boston University. Sigrid has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.
Synopsis:A novel in three sections: 1) the story of a May-December romance; 2) the story of an Iraqi-American detained at Heathrow Airport; and 3) a third section which may or may not tie the two unrelated stories together.
Meet Lisa Halliday
Though Lisa Halliday is in her early 40's, Asymmetry is her first novel. She is so new that, although Asymmetry rates its own Wikipedia page, Halliday does not have a Wiki page of her own. What biography I was able to construct for her comes from an article in the Guardian about the "new faces of fiction for 2018" (Halliday appears about halfway down on the page) and from the official website for the Whiting Award, as Lisa Halliday received a Whiting Award for Fiction for 2017.
The following long quotation is from the Guardian:
...Lisa Halliday, Born in Medfield, a small town 45 minutes outside Boston, to a mechanic father and a mother who started out as a seamstress and went on to found a pest control business, Halliday was a bookish child, who would sit on the steps of the local library waiting for it to open. She graduated from a local school to Harvard, an achievement she attributes to the good fortune of growing up in a town with an outstanding record in public education.
But, though she had always been praised for her writing, she lacked confidence, and says “it was meeting real writers and observing their work ethic and their concerns about their work that made me think I could do this – that all it requires is persistence and perhaps I should give it a go.”
She stayed with the Wylie agency for eight years, working in both their US and UK offices, and punctiliously recording in her journal the wit and wisdom of the authors she encountered along the way, before leaving to embark on own writing career. But only now that she is 41, and living in Milan with the distraction of a small baby, is she is publishing her first novel. ...
Her early attempts at writing her own fiction attracted “encouraging rejections”, one of which described her work as “Babar written by EM Forster” – which she took to mean she had talent but had yet to find a story. It was such useful feedback that she has dropped it into the novel.
Gradually, her work began to find its mark, and she started to publish short stories and author interviews in the Paris Review. When her English husband landed a job as rights director with an Italian publisher, and the couple moved to Milan, the pieces of Asymmetry began to fall into place.
The “lightbulb moment” came when she had the idea of pairing the stories of two young people who happened to be living at the same historical moment, during the Iraq war. At first she tried to force their stories to intersect, but gradually she understood that to do so was a mark of immaturity as a writer. “Sometimes,” as Ezra says, “you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist.”...
Most of the buzz surrounding Asymmetry arises from Halliday's May-December romance with Philip Roth at the time she worked for the Wylie agency in New York City (Wylie were Roth's agents at the time). Roth is widely assumed to be the model for Ezra Blazer in the novel. She touches briefly on this in the video below, along with other themes of the book.
Desert Island Discs
There really is a show on BBC Radio 4 called "Desert Island Discs." If you click on this link right here, you can go to the website and subscribe to the podcast and browse the archives to find out what eight tracks, one book, and a luxury your favorite celebrities would take to a desert island with them.
Of course, since Ezra Blazer is not a real person, his selections won't be in there, so I looked them all up for you.
Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. She becomes the first female diver. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.
Meet Jennifer Egan
Egan was born in Chicago in 1962 but grew up in San Francisco. After graduating from Lowell High School, she majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, Egan spent two years at St John's College, Cambridge supported by a Thouron Award where she earned an MA
Egan came to New York in 1987 and worked a strange array of jobs while learning to write, such as catering at the World Trade Center. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.
Egan's first novel, The Invisible Circus, was released in 1995 and adapted into a film of the same name released in 2001 and starring Cameron Diaz. She has published one short story collection and four novels, among which Look at Me was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
She currently lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. As of February 28, 2018, she is the President of the PEN America Center.
Partial Bibliography
Novels
The Invisible Circus (1995)
Look at Me (2001)
The Keep (2006)
A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
Manhattan Beach (2017)
Short fiction
Emerald City (short story collection; 1993, UK; released in US in 1996)
"Black Box" (short story; 2012, US; released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)
There were shorter videos available of Jennifer Egan talking about Manhattan Beach, but this video at the Brooklyn Historical Society is full of detail about all the research she put into writing this book. There are a few time when she points to slides being displayed over head which are not visible from the camera angle, which I admit is kind of frustrating, but I still found this video more informative than the others I watched.
New York City during the World War II Era
As Jennifer Egan mentions in the above video, Manhattan Beach was a beach-side resort community during the period in which the book was set. I found a page with 16 picture postcards from the Manhattan Beach of that era.
Here are a couple of pictures from the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Here's a video on how to properly deploy an underwater diving suit. Unfortunately it's kind of long, but it helps reinforce the description from the book.
In the book, Anna's father is a bag-man making connections between the Longshormen's Union and the mob. This was a notorious concern at that time, as explained in this article about the link between those two organizations.
The Cadillac 62 Series, the last model off the production line until after the war.
(Dexter Styles car)
The Bay Area's Own Shipbuilding and Repair World War II History
The San Francisco Bay Area had its own prominent role to play in wartime shipping, and you can find monuments to those days if you care to take a short day trip.. The Mare Island shipyards were featured in the book, and you can find a historic park and museum in Vallejo.
Synopsis: Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.
The Deepwater Horizon fire
The Author
Jesmyn Ward was born in Berkeley in 1977. Her family moved to DeLisle, Mississippi, when she was 3 years old, and she grew up there. She was bullied by Black students at the public school she attended, so her mother's employer paid her tuition to a private school, where she was bullied and isolated for being the only Black child in the school. DeLisle forms the model for the fictional town of "Bois Sauvage," which is the setting for both Sing, Unburied, Sing, and her previous novel Salvage the Bones. She moved away from Mississippi to attend Stanford University, where she earned a BA in English in 1999 and an MA in media studies and communication in 2000.
She received a MFA from the University of Michigan and returned to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She was so traumatized by what she saw that she was unable to write for three years, during which time she was shopping around her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, and had become so discouraged that she was making plans to enroll in a nursing program when her book was finally published to much critical acclaim. Her second book was a memoir entitled Men We Reaped about 5 young men from DeLisle who died young, including her younger brother who was killed by a drunk driver. This memoir was short-listed for the National Critics Circle Book Award for autobiography.
In 2011, Ward published her second novel, Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award. Sing, Unburied, Sing, published in 2017, also won the National Book Award. In 2017 she also was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.
In the short PBS video clip below, Jesmyn Ward answers readers' questions about Sing, Unburied, Sing.
For Further Reading
Parchman Farm
The Marshall Project, named in honor of Justice Thurgood Marshall, is great resource for material criminal justice issues. This link will take you to a photo essay about the prison plantation system, like Parchman Farm, which still exists to this day.
David Grann was born on March 10, 1967 to Phyllis E. Grann and Victor Grann of Westport, Connecticut. Phyllis is the former CEO of Putnam Penguin and the first woman CEO of a major publishing firm. His father Victor is an oncologist and Director of the Bennett Cancer Center in Stamford, Connecticut. He holds master’s degrees in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy (Tufts) as well as in creative writing from Boston University. After graduating from Connecticut College in 1989, he received a Thomas Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico. Before joining The New Yorker in 2003, Grann was a senior editor at The New Republic, and, from 1995 until 1996, the executive editor of the newspaper The Hill. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.
Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was also #1 New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the book was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Bloomberg, Publishers Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. It won the Indies Choice award for the single best nonfiction book of the year.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, documented one of the most sinister crimes and racial injustices in American history. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best true crime book, a Spur Award for best work of historical nonfiction, and an Indies Choice Award for best adult nonfiction book of the year. A #1 New York Times bestseller, Killers of the Flower Moon was named one of the best books of the year by the Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, PBS, Bloomberg, GQ, Slate, Buzzfeed, Vogue, and other publications. Amazon named Killers of the Flower Moon the single best book of the year, and so did Shelf Awareness. The book is being adapted into a major motion picture, with Martin Scorsese slated to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to play a role.
His most recent book, The White Darkness, was published in October of 2018, is a true story of adventure and obsession in the Antarctic. He has also published an anthology, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which contains many of his New Yorker stories, and was named by Men’s Journal one of the best true crime books ever written.
In the following video of a "PBS News Hour" book club segment, Grann answers questions from viewers about Killers of the Flower Moon.
In this much longer video delivered at the National Archives, Grann delivers a slide presentation using some of the pictures and other archival material
History of Wolves is a first novel for Emily Fridman, and as a hitherto relative unknown, she doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet. She is around 40 years old and has worked mostly as an English professor and short-story writer. Her first collection of short stories, Catapult, was published the same year as History of Wolves and was nominated for the Mary McCarthy Prize. The first chapter of History of Wolves was initially published as a short story, which Fridlund then decided to expand into the novel, which was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. History of Wolves was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of USA Today’s Notable Books, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and a #1 Indie Next pick. (The last part of this paragraph was lifted wholesale from Emily Fridlund's page on Cornell University's online catalog.)
North Woods of Minnesota
Fridlund grew up in a family of three children in Edina, Minnesota (southwest of Minneapolis), and her family used to vacation on the north shore of Lake Superior, the area where History of Wolves is set. She attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, then Principia College in Illinois, where she earned a bachelor's degree. She earned an MFA in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis, and a doctorate at the University of Southern California. It was while living in LA and missing real winter that she started work on History of Wolves. (See this interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.)
Her academic research has included:
Craft of Fiction
Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature
Twentieth-Century and Contemporary British Literature
Gender Studies, Feminist and Queer Theory
Narrative Theory
the Gothic Novel
Ecocriticism
Animal Studies
Creative Writing
Also because she only recently became a famous author, there is not much on YouTube in the way of interviews. In fact there were only two, one of which had been shot with a phone which had the advantage of being brief, but her voice was barely audible. The one I am posting here is somewhat long, but more interesting, and her voice is easier to hear, although you may still have to crank the volume way up.
