Challenging Ourselves: Three Novels

Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist, and coauthor of the blog-turned-book Stuff Hipsters Hate, which the New Yorker called "depressingly astute." Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, Elle, and many other outlets, and she's held editorial positions at Glamour, Psychology Today, and Self, among other titles. She is the author of The Lost Night (Crown), a book Jessica Knoll writes is, “Tightly paced and skillfully plotted, The Lost Night is a remarkable debut.” In 2009, Edie had New York’s social world in her thrall. Mercurial and beguiling, she was the shining star of a group of recent graduates living in a Brooklyn loft and treating New York like their playground. When Edie’s body was found near a suicide note at the end of a long, drunken night, no one could believe it. A decade later, Lindsay has come a long way from the drug-addled world of Calhoun Lofts. She has devoted best friends, a cozy apartment, and a thriving career as a magazine’s head fact-checker. But when a chance reunion leads Lindsay to discover an unsettling video from that hazy night, she starts to wonder if Edie was actually murdered—and, worse, if she herself was involved. As she rifles through those months in 2009—combing through case files, old technology, and her fractured memories—Lindsay is forced to confront the demons of her own violent history to bring the truth to light.

Eileen Pollack is the author of several novels including The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering; two short-story collections and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. Her novella "The Bris" was chosen to appear in Best American Short Stories, edited by Stephen King. Pollack graduated with a BS in physics from Yale and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In The Professor of Immortality (Delphinium) professor Maxine Sayers once founded the Institute of Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. But when her beloved husband dies, she is so devastated she can barely get out of bed. To make matters worse, her son, Zach, has abruptly quit his job in Silicon Valley and been out of contact for seven months. Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student (and a former close friend of her son) might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that Zach might either be involved in or become a victim. This compels her to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him. Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances, called The Professor of Immortality “a tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and—maybe even trickier—of trying to be a decent mom. It’s also page by page a joy to read. Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest and most companionable novelists out there.”

Mesha Maren’s short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Oxford American, the Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Federal Prison Camp Alderson and is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Duke University. Lauren Groff calls her latest book, Sugar Run (Algonquin Books), “A heady admixture of explosive plot and taut, burnished prose . . .” In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she’s sentenced to life in prison. When she’s released eighteen years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian Mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends. There, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life, the use and treachery of makeshift families, and how, no matter the distance we think we’ve traveled from the mistakes we’ve made, too often we find ourselves standing in precisely the place we began.