Family Stories in Fiction

Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her writing has also appeared in n+1. Her debut novel, The Wallcreeper, was published in 2014. Her latest novel, Longlisted for a 2015 National Book Award in Fiction is Mislaid (Ecco), a wickedly humorous and sharply observed novel that exposes all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire, through the making and unmaking of one American family. Jonathan Franken writes, “[Zink’s] work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.” NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Lauren Groff is the author of the novel The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award. Her work has appeared in journals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Tin House, One Story, McSweeney’s, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of the Best American Short Stories. Her latest novel, Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books), is an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times bestsellers I Was Told There'd Be Cake (a Thurber Prize finalist) and How Did You Get This Number. She’s also a frequent contributor to The New York Times. Part comedy of manners, part treasure hunt, The Clasp (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the first novel from the writer whom David Sedaris calls "perfectly, relentlessly funny."