A.M. Homes was born in Washington D.C. graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa, lives in New York City and teaches at Princeton University. Her work appears in ArtForum, Granta, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Electric Literature, Playboy, and Zoetrope. She works in television, most recently as as Co-Executive Producer of Falling Water and Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She is the recipient of awards including the Guggenheim, NEA, and NYFA fellowships. Her most recent novel, May We Be Forgiven, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2013, and has been optioned for film by Unanimous Entertainment.
THE MISTRESS' DAUGHTER
"A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an
honesty few of us would risk." --Zadie Smith
"Fierce and eloquent." --The New York Times Book Review
"As startling and riveting as her fiction . . . a lacerating memoir
in which the formerly powerless child triumphs with the help of a
mighty pen." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor
with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency
become infectious." --USA Today
"I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively
to the end." --Amy Tan
"As a memoirist, A.M. Homes takes a characteristically fierce and
fearless approach. And she has a whopper of a personal story to
tell." --Chicago Tribune
DAYS OF AWE
“A.M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it
means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies . . . DAYS OF
AWE is sliced through with Homes’s dark humor . . . one wants to
read passages of a Homes story aloud because they are so fine . . .
DAYS OF AWE feels like the part of the day when the sun is about to
go down and the light is brighter while the shadows are darker.
Everything has a sharp edge, is strikingly beautiful and suddenly
also a little menacing.” —Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times
Book Review
“Exuberantly transgressive.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“[Homes] has shown a unique penchant for cracking open the dark
heart of human nature — with irreverent wit, devastating empathy
and haunting shocks . . . DAYS OF AWE [is] a memorable assortment
of new tales about family, love, death, and an unqualified man who
somehow stumbles into becoming a populist political
candidate.” —Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
“Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’
conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of
self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of
language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing
another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and
[this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there
are, at least, tools available to help us try.” —Vanity
Fair
“Fascinating . . . I consumed these stories exactly like a
spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge,
and I felt sharply observed in turn. Homes, with her fierce sharp
wit, reveals her characters’ deep flaws. No one gets away with
anything and the spectacle is delightful.” —Molly Livingston,
The Paris Review Daily
"With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of
everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected
situations." —Time
“In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the
collection when he describes the way people hold the history of
previous generations inside them. ‘We carry it with us, not just in
our grandmother’s silver,’ he says, ‘but in our bodies, the cells
of our hearts.’” —Wall Street Journal
MAY WE BE FORGIVEN
Winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction
“An entertaining, old-fashioned American story about second
chances…A.M. Homes is a writer I’ll pretty much follow anywhere
because she’s indeed so smart, it’s scary; yet she’s not without
heart…May We Be Forgiven [is] deeply imbued with the kind of It’s A
Wonderful Life-type belief in redemption that we Americans will
always be suckers for, and rightly so.” —Maureen Corrigan,
Fresh Air
“Cheever country with a black comedy upgrade…Homes crams a
tremendous amount of ambition into May We Be Forgiven, with its
dark humor, its careening plot, its sex-strewn suburb and a massive
cast of memorable characters...its riskiest content, however, is
something different: sentiment. This is a Tin Man story, in
which the zoned-out Harry slowly grows a heart.” —Carolyn
Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times
“Darkly funny…the moments shared between this ad hoc family are the
novel’s most endearing…Homes’ signature trait is a fearless
inclination to torment her characters and render their failures,
believing that the reader is sophisticated enough – and forgiving
enough – to tag along.” —Katie Arnold-Ratliff, Time
Magazine
“Homes, whose masterful handling of suburban dystopia merits her
own adjective, may have just written her midcareer magnum opus with
this portrait of a flawed Nixonian bent on some sort of emotional
amnesty.” —Christopher Bollen, Interview
“At once tender and uproariously funny…one of the strangest, most
miraculous journeys in recent fiction, not unlike a man swimming
home to his lonely house, one swimming pool at a time: it is
an act of desperation turned into one of grace.” —John
Freeman, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A big American story with big American themes, the saga of the
triumph of a new kind of self-invented nuclear family over
cynicism, apathy, loneliness, greed, and technological tyranny…this
novel has a strong moral core, neither didactic nor judgmental,
that holds out the possibility of redemption through
connection.” –Kate Christensen, Elle
“A.M. Homes has long been one of our most important and original
writers of fiction. May We Be Forgiven is her most ambitious as
well as her most accessible novel to date; sex and violence invade
the routines of suburban domestic life in a way that reminded me of
The World According to Garp, although in the end it’s a thoroughly
original work of imagination.” –Jay McInerney, New York Times
bestselling author of The Good Life
“I started this book in the A.M., finished in the P.M., and
couldn’t sleep all night. Ms. Homes just gets better and
better.” —Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author
of Our Country Friends
“What if whoever wrote the story of Job had a sense of humor? Nixon
is pondered. One character donates her organs. Another tries
to grow a heart. A seductive minefield of a novel from A.M.
Homes.” —John Sayles, author of A Moment in the Sun
“I started reading A.M. Homes twenty years ago. Wild and funny,
questioning and true, she is a writer to go travelling with on the
journey called life.” —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times
bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
“Homes’ dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . .
Laugh-out loud funny.” --The Boston Globe
“An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like
no one else.” --The Philadelphia Inquirer
“I think this brave story of a lost man’s reconnection with the
world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The
Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And hey, maybe
it will save somebody’s life.” --Stephen King
Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and
has the talent to pull it off.” --San Francisco Chronicle
IN A COUNTRY OF MOTHERS
"Homes...has the ability to scare you half to death....[She is]
devastating...a very dangerous writer." —Washington Post Book
World
"A commanding narrative...by turns witty and unnerving, and at
times almost unbearable in its emotional intensity.” —Wall
Street Journal
"Intriguing...captures a world spinning out of control....Homes is
at her best evoking the pathos and obsession at the center of
relationships between therapist and patient, mother and child,
husband and wife. She is also wickedly funny. [This is] a
psychologically gripping story.” —San Francisco Chronicle
THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS
“Enthralling . . . full of subversive humor and truth . . .
original and stiletto sharp.” —The Washington Post
“Wonderfully skewed stories . . . sharp, funny, and playful . . .
Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life
as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A
fully engaged imagination [is] at work—and play.” —Amy Hempel,
The Los Angeles Times
“Alarmingly good . . . It is hard to say exactly who Homes’s
predecessors are—Roald Dahl, Rachel Ingalls, and J.D. Salinger all
come to mind—but in many ways she is not unlike Cheever.” —The
Village Voice
“These stories are remarkable. They are awesomely well-written. In
the sense of arousing fear and wonder in the reader they entertain,
but what they principally bring us is a sense of recognition . . .
Here are all the things that even today, even in our frank
outspoken times, we don’t talk about. We think of them punishingly
in sleepless nights.” —Ruth Rendell
“An unnerving glimpse through the windows of other people’s lives.
A.M. Homes is a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of
the way we live now is anything but safe.” —Meg Wolitzer
THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
“Homes’ dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . .
Laugh-out loud funny.” --The Boston Globe
“An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like
no one else.” --The Philadelphia Inquirer
“I think this brave story of a lost man’s reconnection with the
world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The
Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And hey, maybe
it will save somebody’s life.” --Stephen King
Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and
has the talent to pull it off.” --San Francisco Chronicle
JACK
“A moving novel, and a very refreshing one. Jack is such an
engaging, attractive human being, it’s a pleasure to believe in
him.” —David Foster Wallace
“The engaging, doggedly funny [Jack] is likable from the first
paragraph, a good kid caught in circumstances too much for him. And
in the particulars of those circumstances, A. M. Homes touches upon
something unique. Ms. Homes handles the big subjects subtly, deftly
and with an appealing lack of melodrama.” —The New York Times Book
Review
“A. M. Homes has created a most endearing teenager, and an
intensely real world around him .... A fine book.”—Hilma
Wolitzer
THE UNFOLDING
Fortchoming September 2022
"From her first book onward, A.M. Homes has been challenging us to
look at fiction, the world, and one other as we haven’t
done—because we haven’t had the nerve, the eyes, the dire and
dispassionate imagination. Gripping, sad, funny, by turns
aching and antic and, as always, exceedingly well-observed and
written, The Unfolding opens up another one of her jagged windows,
at times indistinguishable from a crack, in the world that is
always unfolding, and always vanishing, around us. " --
Michael Chabon, bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author
of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“A terrific black comedy, written almost entirely in pitch-perfect
dialogue, that feels terrifying close to the unfunny
truth.” -- Salman Rushdie, New York Times bestselling author
of The Golden House and Quichotte
"A dazzling portrait of a family—and a country—in flux. A story
about what happens when truths that once seemed self-evident turn
out to be neither self-evident nor even true. A.M. Homes has
perfectly captured an America as it lurches toward freak-out, and a
family as it shreds the lies it’s been living by. The
Unfolding is hilarious and shocking and heartbreaking and just
a little bit deranged—in other words, it’s a book that feels like
what it feels like to be alive right now." --Nathan Hill,
author of The Nix
Adopted at birth, the distinguished novelist explains what happened when her birth parents came looking for her 30 years later. With an eight-city tour; online reading guide. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
THE MISTRESS' DAUGHTER
"A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an
honesty few of us would risk." --Zadie Smith
"Fierce and eloquent." --The New York Times Book Review
"As startling and riveting as her fiction . . . a lacerating memoir
in which the formerly powerless child triumphs with the help of a
mighty pen." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor
with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency
become infectious." --USA Today
"I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively
to the end." --Amy Tan
"As a memoirist, A.M. Homes takes a characteristically fierce and
fearless approach. And she has a whopper of a personal story to
tell." --Chicago Tribune
DAYS OF AWE
"A.M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it
means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies . . . DAYS OF
AWE is sliced through with Homes's dark humor . . . one wants to
read passages of a Homes story aloud because they are so fine . . .
DAYS OF AWE feels like the part of the day when the sun is about to
go down and the light is brighter while the shadows are darker.
Everything has a sharp edge, is strikingly beautiful and suddenly
also a little menacing." -Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times
Book Review
"Exuberantly transgressive." -O, the Oprah Magazine
"[Homes] has shown a unique penchant for cracking open the dark
heart of human nature - with irreverent wit, devastating empathy
and haunting shocks . . . DAYS OF AWE [is] a memorable assortment
of new tales about family, love, death, and an unqualified man who
somehow stumbles into becoming a populist political candidate."
-Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
"Homes's keen ear for speech-surreal as her characters'
conversations often are-lends itself to varying degrees of
self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of
language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing
another person completely is one of life's painful truths, and
[this] collection remind us of that-but [it] also shows that there
are, at least, tools available to help us try." -Vanity
Fair
"Fascinating . . . I consumed these stories exactly like a
spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge,
and I felt sharply observed in turn. Homes, with her fierce sharp
wit, reveals her characters' deep flaws. No one gets away with
anything and the spectacle is delightful." -Molly Livingston,
The Paris Review Daily
"With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of
everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected
situations." -Time
"In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the
collection when he describes the way people hold the history of
previous generations inside them. 'We carry it with us, not just in
our grandmother's silver,' he says, 'but in our bodies, the cells
of our hearts.'" -Wall Street Journal
MAY WE BE FORGIVEN
Winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction
"An entertaining, old-fashioned American story about second
chances...A.M. Homes is a writer I'll pretty much follow anywhere
because she's indeed so smart, it's scary; yet she's not without
heart...May We Be Forgiven [is] deeply imbued with the kind
of It's A Wonderful Life-type belief in redemption that we
Americans will always be suckers for, and rightly so." -Maureen
Corrigan, Fresh Air
"Cheever country with a black comedy upgrade...Homes crams a
tremendous amount of ambition into May We Be Forgiven, with
its dark humor, its careening plot, its sex-strewn suburb and a
massive cast of memorable characters...its riskiest content,
however, is something different: sentiment. This is a Tin Man
story, in which the zoned-out Harry slowly grows a heart." -Carolyn
Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times
"Darkly funny...the moments shared between this ad hoc family are
the novel's most endearing...Homes' signature trait is a fearless
inclination to torment her characters and render their failures,
believing that the reader is sophisticated enough - and forgiving
enough - to tag along." -Katie Arnold-Ratliff, Time
Magazine
"Homes, whose masterful handling of suburban dystopia merits her
own adjective, may have just written her midcareer magnum opus with
this portrait of a flawed Nixonian bent on some sort of emotional
amnesty." -Christopher Bollen, Interview
"At once tender and uproariously funny...one of the strangest, most
miraculous journeys in recent fiction, not unlike a man swimming
home to his lonely house, one swimming pool at a time: it is an act
of desperation turned into one of grace." -John Freeman, The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"A big American story with big American themes, the saga of the
triumph of a new kind of self-invented nuclear family over
cynicism, apathy, loneliness, greed, and technological
tyranny...this novel has a strong moral core, neither didactic nor
judgmental, that holds out the possibility of redemption through
connection." -Kate Christensen, Elle
"A.M. Homes has long been one of our most important and original
writers of fiction. May We Be Forgiven is her most ambitious as
well as her most accessible novel to date; sex and violence invade
the routines of suburban domestic life in a way that reminded me of
The World According to Garp, although in the end it's a thoroughly
original work of imagination." -Jay McInerney, New York
Times bestselling author of The Good Life
"I started this book in the A.M., finished in the P.M., and
couldn't sleep all night. Ms. Homes just gets better and better."
-Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of
Our Country Friends
"What if whoever wrote the story of Job had a sense of humor? Nixon
is pondered. One character donates her organs. Another tries to
grow a heart. A seductive minefield of a novel from A.M. Homes."
-John Sayles, author of A Moment in the Sun
"I started reading A.M. Homes twenty years ago. Wild and funny,
questioning and true, she is a writer to go travelling with on the
journey called life." -Jeanette Winterson, New York Times
bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be
Normal?
THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
"Homes' dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . .
Laugh-out loud funny." --The Boston Globe
"An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like
no one else." --The Philadelphia Inquirer
"I think this brave story of a lost man's reconnection with the
world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The
Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And
hey, maybe it will save somebody's life." --Stephen King
Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and
has the talent to pull it off." --San Francisco
Chronicle
IN A COUNTRY OF MOTHERS
"Homes...has the ability to scare you half to death....[She is]
devastating...a very dangerous writer." -Washington Post Book
World
"A commanding narrative...by turns witty and unnerving, and at
times almost unbearable in its emotional intensity." -Wall
Street Journal
"Intriguing...captures a world spinning out of control....Homes is
at her best evoking the pathos and obsession at the center of
relationships between therapist and patient, mother and child,
husband and wife. She is also wickedly funny. [This is] a
psychologically gripping story." -San Francisco
Chronicle
THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS
"Enthralling . . . full of subversive humor and truth . . .
original and stiletto sharp." -The Washington Post
"Wonderfully skewed stories . . . sharp, funny, and playful . . .
Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life
as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A
fully engaged imagination [is] at work-and play." -Amy Hempel,
The Los Angeles Times
"Alarmingly good . . . It is hard to say exactly who Homes's
predecessors are-Roald Dahl, Rachel Ingalls, and J.D. Salinger all
come to mind-but in many ways she is not unlike Cheever." -The
Village Voice
"These stories are remarkable. They are awesomely
well-written. In the sense of arousing fear and wonder in the
reader they entertain, but what they principally bring us is a
sense of recognition . . . Here are all the things that even today,
even in our frank outspoken times, we don't talk about. We think of
them punishingly in sleepless nights." -Ruth Rendell
"An unnerving glimpse through the windows of other people's lives.
A.M. Homes is a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of
the way we live now is anything but safe." -Meg Wolitzer
THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
"Homes' dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . .
Laugh-out loud funny." --The Boston Globe
"An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like
no one else." --The Philadelphia Inquirer
"I think this brave story of a lost man's reconnection with the
world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The
Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And
hey, maybe it will save somebody's life." --Stephen King
Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and
has the talent to pull it off." --San Francisco
Chronicle
JACK
"A moving novel, and a very refreshing one. Jack is such an
engaging, attractive human being, it's a pleasure to believe in
him." -David Foster Wallace
"The engaging, doggedly funny [Jack] is likable from the first
paragraph, a good kid caught in circumstances too much for him. And
in the particulars of those circumstances, A. M. Homes touches upon
something unique. Ms. Homes handles the big subjects subtly, deftly
and with an appealing lack of melodrama." -The New York
Times Book Review
"A. M. Homes has created a most endearing teenager, and an
intensely real world around him .... A fine book."-Hilma
Wolitzer
THE UNFOLDING
Fortchoming September 2022
"From her first book onward, A.M. Homes has been challenging us to
look at fiction, the world, and one other as we haven't
done-because we haven't had the nerve, the eyes, the dire and
dispassionate imagination. Gripping, sad, funny, by turns aching
and antic and, as always, exceedingly well-observed and written,
The Unfolding opens up another one of her jagged windows, at
times indistinguishable from a crack, in the world that is always
unfolding, and always vanishing, around us. " -- Michael Chabon,
bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow
and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
"A terrific black comedy, written almost entirely in pitch-perfect
dialogue, that feels terrifying close to the unfunny truth." --
Salman Rushdie, New York Times bestselling author of The
Golden House and Quichotte
"A dazzling portrait of a family-and a country-in flux. A story
about what happens when truths that once seemed self-evident turn
out to be neither self-evident nor even true. A.M. Homes has
perfectly captured an America as it lurches toward freak-out, and a
family as it shreds the lies it's been living by. The Unfolding is
hilarious and shocking and heartbreaking and just a little bit
deranged-in other words, it's a book that feels like what it feels
like to be alive right now." --Nathan Hill, author of The
Nix
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