SEASON TWO AUTHORS
Maaza Mengiste
Photo Credit: Nina Subin
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The Shadow King (Publication Date: September 24, 2019 W.W. Norton and Company)
Real Fiction Broadcast Date(s) September 18 and 25
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The Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A Fulbright Scholar and professor in the
MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation program at Queens College, she is the author
of The Shadow King and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, named one of the Guardian’s Ten Best
Contemporary African Books. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, Granta, and the New
York Times, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
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In 1935, orphaned servant Hirut struggles to adapt to her new household as Ethiopia faces Mussolini’s looming invasion. As the battles begin in earnest, Hirut and other women must care for the wounded. But when Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia is about to lose hope, Hirut helps to disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor to keep the fight alive. She becomes his guard, inspiring women to join the war against fascism. In this extraordinary, beautifully told epic, Hirut overcomes rape, violence, and imprisonment, finding the strength to fight for her country’s freedom and her own. Maaza Mengiste breathes life into complicated characters on both sides of the battle line, shaping a searing story of ordinary women and the advanced army they courageously opposed. Set against the first real conflict of World War II, The Shadow King is a heartrending, indelible exploration of what it means to be a woman at war.
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Starred Review: Publisher's Weekly
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Wall Street Journal:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ethiopias-highlands-a-search-for-hope-and-horror-11566319044
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Louisa Treger
Photo Credit: Nick Harvey
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The Dragon Lady (Publication Date Aug. 13, 2019 Bloomsbury Caraval)
Real Fiction Broadcast Dates: October 2 and 9
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Louisa Treger has worked as a classical violinist. She studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher. Treger subsequently turned to literature, gaining a First Class degree and a Ph.D. in English at University College London, where she focused on early 20th century women’s writing and was awarded the West Scholarship and the Rosa Morison Scholarship “for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature.” The Lodger was published in 2014 and she is currently working on her third novel. She lives in London.
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Louisa Treger brings to life the untold story of a fiercely independent and inspiring woman ahead of her time: Lady Virginia (Ginie) Courtauld, the “Dragon Lady,” so-called for the exotic tattoo snaking up her leg. Lady Virginia Courtauld was a boundary-breaking, extremely colorful, and unconventional person. Her marriage to textile millionaire Stephen Courtauld sent shockwaves through London society in the 1920s. Not only was she not of the right pedigree being half-Italian, half-Transylvanian, but she had a scandalous tattoo and rejected the submissive role women were expected to play.
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Maggie Paxson
Photo Credit: Matt Mendelsohn
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"The Plateau" Riverhead Books August 13, 2019
Real Fiction Radio Broadcast Dates: October 16 and 23
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Maggie Paxson is a writer, anthropologist and performer. She is also the author of Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village. Fluent in Russian and French, she has worked in rural communities in northern Russia, the Caucasus and France.
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Starred Reviews: Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist
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Finding herself in a crisis of direction after years of fieldwork in strife-torn places, Maggie Paxson set out on a quest to study peace. Her explorations led her to The Plateau, a remote pocket of south-central France, where people have been providing refuge to strangers for generations. .During WWII, villagers deep in the heart of France gave safe harbor to countless strangers - mostly children - as they fled for their lives. The same place offers refuge to migrants today. Why?
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-plateau-review-a-culture-of-selflessness-11565736945
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Susan Richards Shreve
Photo Credit: Linda Fittante
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"More News Tomorrow" (W.W. Norton & Company
Real Fiction Radio Broadcast:Dates: October 30 and November 6
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Susan Shreve is the author of fifteen novels and twenty-nine books for children. She has edited or co-edited five anthologies and her essays have appeared in several collections as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post and several magazines.
She was co-founder and has been a Professor in the Master of Fine Arts Program at George Mason University for more than forty years. Susan has been a Jenny Moore Fellow at George Washington University, a visiting writer at Princeton University, for several years at the School of the Arts of Columbia University, Bennington College Summer Seminars and Goucher College.
In 1985, she co-founded the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and served for thirty years most recently as Chairman. PEN/Faulkner began as an award in Fiction but developed a Writers in Schools Program in which more than 200 writers discuss their books in all of the DC public and public charter schools. The writers work as well with incarcerated youth and pregnant high school students.
She has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, a grant in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Grub Street Award in Non-Fiction, the Alumni Award at the Sidwell Friends School, and the Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers. She serves on the Advisory Board of Poets and Writers and the board for The Cheuse International Center at George Mason University.
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Alexandra Fuller
Photo Credit: Tig
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"Travel Light, Move Fast" Penguin Press August 6, 2019
Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: November 13 and 20
ALEXANDRA FULLER was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her midtwenties. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming. She is the author of several memoirs, including Leaving Before the Rains Come, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/review/travel-light-move-fast-alexandra-fuller.html
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A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father’s death, as she and her mother return to his farm with his ashes and contend with his overwhelming absence, and her childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. Writing with reverent irreverence of the rollicking grand misadventures of her mother and father, bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, Fuller takes their insatiable appetite for life to heart. Here, in Fuller’s Africa, is a story of joy, resilience, and vitality.
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Rion Amilcar Scott
"The World Doesn't Require You" Liverlight August 20, 2019
Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: November 27 and December 4, 2019
Rion Amilcar Scott's first book, Insurrections, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, PANK, and Confrontation, among other publications.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/books/review/the-world-doesnt-require-you-rion-amilcar-scott.html
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Jami Attenberg
Photo Credit:
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"All This Could Be Yours" Houghton Mifflin Harcourt October 22, 2019
Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: December 11 and 18
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Jami is the author of six books: Instant Love, The Kept Man, The Melting Season, New York Times bestseller The Middlesteins, Saint Mazie, and national bestseller All Grown Up, which was published in March 2017 in the US and the UK, and in Italy, Germany, France, Holland, Poland, Russia, China, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Portugal and Hungary in 2018. Her seventh book, All This Could Be Yours, will be published on October 22, 2019. It will be published in 2020 in England, Germany, Italy, China, and Lithuania.
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On the Best of Fall lists from People, Vogue, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, New York, Observer, Bust, Nylon, New York Post, Pop Sugar and more.
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“Prickly and unsentimental, but never quite hopeless, Attenberg poet laureate of difficult families, captures the relentlessly lonely beauty of being alive.”
—Kirkus, starred review
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