 |
 |
|
Jane Avrich's stories have appeared in Harper's Magazine, Paris Review Ploughshares, Story, and other journals and have been nominated for The Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She currently teaches English at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn and lives in New York City.
The Winter Without Milk
Jane Avrich explores the perils of desire in these fifteen brilliant stories. Here are characters irresistibly attracted to excess — material, emotional, spiritual — who must in the end choose between a life of self-indulgence and a life of self-control. The results are both disastrous and uplifting, and often wickedly funny. Throughout The Winter without Milk are reimagined characters from literature and history — Oedipus, Lady Macbeth, Scheherezade, for example — as well as everyday people who want more. Avrich's writing ranges from whimsical to cerebral. She pays homage to everyone from Kafka to Keats to Sophocles but is very much an original and a major new talent in contemporary fiction.
Jane Avrich's Summer Reading List
Decline and Fall
by Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh's first novel is as picaresque as it is zany. The absurdist satire follows Paul Pennyfeather's unfortunate escapades at Scone College and his perverse and madcap adventures as a teacher at the Llabanna Castle school.
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
The bulky and compelling mystery concerns a sacred stone and the consequences of its theft for an upright, if a tad drugged-out, English family. A page-turner involving love, deception, exoticism, and opium.
The Story of Lucy Gault
by William Trevor
I'd read anything by Trevor. With his cool yet compassionate tone and elegant classical sentences, he is one of the best storytellers in the English language. His patient, restrained novels are affecting and unusual. The Story of Lucy Gault, his latest, is about a little girl who runs away when family is forced to leave their lovely Irish estate in a time of political unrest. Her impulsive decision ends up turning her family and entire future inside out.
Stevie Smith, the Collected Poems
by Stevie Smith
Stevie Smith is a bona fide and unaffected eccentric. Reclusive, nutty and strangely shrewd, she scribbles out wacky observations and curious folkloric ballads, complete with her own little sketches and illustrations of cats, plants, pots, and strange, smirking women with pointy feet. Many of her poems are simply engaging, while others are profoundly wise and disturbing meditations on the vast, cruelly playful forces of Death, Fate and Nature, as well as the bizarre little people that skitter about under their auspices.
The Russian Debutante's Handbook
by Gary Shteyngart
A hilarious picaresque novel about a young Russian-American slacker who tries to do his best but gets in trouble when he becomes involves in a scam To defraud the Russian emigre community.
Back to Authors'
Summer Reading Lists
|
|
|
