- 1049 reads
Printer-friendly version
Kate Greathead and Joan Silber
- 1049 reads
From October 13, 2018. Kate Greathead proves herself an impassioned observer and insightful storyteller in her incisive debut novel, Laura & Emma, which takes on the challenges of motherhood and class. Laura is a lifelong Manhattanite who was born into an Upper East Side family with old money and old values. In 1981, thirty-something and aimless, she meets Jefferson, the two have a one-night stand, and nine months later, Emma arrives into the world. Despite having been the prodigal progressive of the family, Laura chooses to raise her daughter among all of the luxuries and eccentricities her family has to offer, for better or for worse. Told in a series of vignettes, this novel is a stylish and witty meditation on family and identity. Literary great Joan Silber’s new book, Improvement: A Novel, tells the rippling story of Reyna, a single mother in New York City whose choices in men often have her aunt Kiki worried. Reyna visits her partner, Boyd, at Rikers during his three-month sentence, and while she knows their relationship isn’t perfect, his hold on her grows ever-tighter. What Kiki doesn’t know is that Reyna has been aiding Boyd’s cigarette smuggling scheme. When Reyna ultimately decides her involvement is too risky for herself and her young daughter, the consequences are more far-reaching than anyone could have imagined, affecting both close relations and strangers. “Without fuss or flourishes,” wrote the Wall Street Journal, “Joan Silber weaves a remarkably patterned tapestry connecting strangers from around the world . . . The writing here is funny and down-to-earth, the characters are recognizably fallible, and the message is quietly profound: We are not ever really alone, however lonely we feel.”Kate Greathead’s first novel, Laura & Emma, was published by Simon & Schuster in March 2018. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, and Vanity Fair, and on NPR’s Moth Radio Hour. She is a nine-time Moth Storytelling Slam champion. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Teddy Wayne. Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction. The most18recent, Improvement, is the winner of the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and was listed as one of the year’s best books by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Seattle Times, and Kirkus. Her previous book, Fools, was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Other works include The Size of the World, finalist for the LA Times Fiction Prize, and Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
