Susan Straight has published eight novels and a memoir, In the Country of Women. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family.
Praise for Highwire Moon:
A National Book Award Finalist
“Her gallery of misfits reminds one of Flannery O’Connor’s—but with
a dash of sympathy and human goodness.”—The Washington Post Book
World
“An eye–opener of a novel, a road map to the real California . . .
[Straight] turns headlines into poetry.”—The New York Times Book
Review
“Packed with the kind of detail about people, places and emotions
that transport the reader to a different world.”—San Francisco
Chronicle
“One of America’s gutsiest writers . . . a polyglot with an
astonishing ear for how people really talk in places we hardly
remember they are living.”—The Baltimore Sun
“Heartrending.”—Publishers Weekly
Praise for In The Country of Women:
“What a beautiful book! In the Country of Women must be the most
populated, celebratory, filled–with–life memoir of our time. With
her characteristic mix of compassion, warmth, humor, and acerbic
insight, Susan Straight writes of her ‘massive black and mixed–race
family’ and her ‘quirky, deeply embedded white family’—a memoir
that is, though addressed to her three daughters, a valentine to
virtually everyone whom the renowned author has known in the course
of her vividly described life. Unlike most contemporary memoirs,
which focus upon singular, self–obsessed individuals, Susan
Straight’s is about an entire way of life, lived with great verve
and passion: ‘a strange California transcendentalism which never
fit in with American upward mobility.’” —Joyce Carol Oates
“In the Country of Women is moving, fierce, and gorgeous. In a time
of individualistic fragmentation and the tearing of the social
fabric, Straight offers the contrary narrative, the essential need
for community, its past and future, and celebrates her place in its
weaving.” —Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander
“In the Country of Women is the astonishingly beautiful story of a
life and family history that could only happen in California, just
as California is a place (and an idea—of expansion, light, color, a
meeting of bloodlines and cultures) that could only happen in
America.” —Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
