Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh is the first author to be discussed in The Literary Sojourn Author Study 2013. This book group is a series of book discussion programs designed to enhance the experience of reading for this year's Literary Sojourn. Participants read and discuss works from each of the featured authors prior to the live event.

About the Literary Sojourn Author Study Series

Bud Werner Memorial Library's Michelle Dover facilitates the free discussions and the study is limited to 12 participants per meeting. Register for this session online or call Michelle at 970-367-4907.

The Literary Sojourn Author Study is a series of book discussion programs designed to enhance the experience of reading for this year's Literary Sojourn. Participants read and discuss works from each of the featured authors prior to the live event on Oct. 5, 2012.

About The Novel

In her masterful first novel Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh delivers the compelling story of three women who marry the same man -- an enigmatic opportunist named Ken Kimble. Kimble is revealed through the eyes of the women he seduces: his first wife, Birdie Bell, who struggles to hold herself together in the months following his desertion; his second wife, Joan Cohen, a lonely heiress shaken by personal tragedy, who sees in Kimble her last chance at happiness; and finally Dinah Whitacre, a beautiful but damaged woman half his age.

Woven throughout is the story of Kimble's son, Charlie, whose life is forever affected by a father he barely remembers. Ken Kimble is a chameleon, a man able to become, at least for a while, all things to all women. To each of the three Mrs. Kimbles, he appears as a hero to whom powerful needs and nameless longings may be attached. Only later do they glimpse the truth about this elusive, unknowable man. A captivating exploration of human love, marriage, and the illusions upon which it is founded, Mrs. Kimble presents a fascinating psychological portrait of a mesmerizing opportunist and the women who believe in him.

Location: Street: Bud Werner Library Additional: Conference Room - Administration Wing City: Steamboat Springs, Province: Colorado Postal Code: 80487 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

“Jennifer Haigh’s stories rove across time and cultures as easily as they render the tendernesses and longings and hardscrabble deprivations of home. News from Heaven is well-named, given that its unsentimental compassion and observational acuity. . . is just what we need right now.” Jim Shepard, author of Like you'd understand, anyway “The characters in Jennifer Haigh’s News from Heaven are so vividly drawn, the inner lives revealed so deftly, with such intelligence and sympathy, that fictional Bakerton, Pennsylvania, takes on the additional weight of, say, Winesburg, Ohio.” Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls Jennifer Haigh is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, Faith; The Condition; Baker Towers, winner of the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Fiction, and Mrs. Kimble, for which she won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short fiction has been published widely, including in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories 2012, and other publications. She lives in the Boston area.

Location: Street: Porter Square Shopping Center Additional: 25 White Street City: Cambridge, Province: Massachusetts Postal Code: 02140 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

The bestselling author of Faith and The Condition returns with a collection of unforgettable short stories inspired by a Pennsylvania coal-mining town and the people who call it home.

When her iconic novel Baker Towers was published in 2005, it was hailed as a modern classic—"compassionate and powerful . . . a song of praise for a too-little-praised part of America, for the working families whose toils and constancy have done so much to make the country great" (Chicago Tribune). Its young author, Jennifer Haigh, was "an expert natural storyteller with an acute sense of her characters' humanity" (New York Times). Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two world wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding—sometimes cruelly—succeeding generations to the place that made them. A young woman glimpses a world both strange and familiar when she becomes a live-in maid for a Jewish family in New York City. A long-absent brother makes a sudden and tragic homecoming. A solitary middle-aged woman tastes unexpected love when a young man returns to town. With a revolving cast of characters—many familiar to fans of Baker Towers—these stories explore how our roots, the families and places in which we are raised, shape the people we eventually become. News from Heaven looks unflinchingly at the conflicting human desires for escape and for connection, and explores the enduring hold of home.

Jennifer Haigh is the author of the short story collection News from Heaven and four critically acclaimed novels: Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble. Her books have won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for work by a New England writer. Her short fiction has been published widely, in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories 2012, and many other publications. She lives in the Boston area.

Location: Andover Bookstore Street: 89 R Main Street City: Andover, Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Please welcome to the Bookshop on Thursday, January 31st at 7 pm Jennifer Haigh, reading from her latest collection of short stories, News from Heaven.

Long before she wrote such New York Times bestselling novels as Faith and The Condition, Jennifer Haigh was a passionate student and teacher, reader and writer, of the short story. Though widely published in magazines -- from The Atlantic Monthly and Granta to The Saturday Evening Post – her stories have never before appeared in book form. News from Heaven is a collection of ten new stories set in and around the fictionalized mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania – a world familiar to readers of Baker Towers, Haigh’s award-winning second novel, beloved by readers and critics alike.

Called “an expert natural storyteller with an acute sense of her characters’ humanity” (New York Times), and “a gifted chronicler of the human condition” (Washington Post Book World), Haigh has long been recognized for “a great gift for telling interwoven…stories” (Janet Maslin, New York Times Book Review). That talent is in full flower in News from Heaven, an honest and anguished portrait of a company town on an unsettling journey from boom to bust, where intimate secrets and public events collide with unexpected consequences.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Jennifer Haigh has been published in The Best American Short Stories 2012,won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England writer, and been named a finalist for Book Sense Book of the Year. Her books have been published in sixteen languages.

Location: Street: 65 Main Street City: Concord, Province: Massachusetts Postal Code: 01742-2503 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

“The Paternity Test is a searingly honest portrait of love under fire, a fearless exploration of what it means to be an adult, a couple, a family. It is a story for our time.” Jennifer Haigh, author of Faith

“Michael Lowenthal’s new novel deftly and wisely explores the various ways families are formed, altered, and destroyed by charting the vagaries and exigencies of two marriages. I love the complicated, compelling characters, all of whom come alive in the beautifully evoked Cape Cod setting. The Paternity Test is a riveting and wonderful book.” Peter Cameron, author of Coral Glynn

Michael Lowenthal is the author of three previous novels; The Same Embrace, Avoidance, and Charity Girl, which was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” a Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007” selection, and a Book Sense Top Twenty Pick. The recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he is a core faculty member in Lesley University’s MFA program in creative writing. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Location: Street: Porter Square Shopping Center Additional: 25 White Street City: Cambridge, Province: Massachusetts Postal Code: 02140 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Join Porter Square Books at the Middlesex Lounge for a conversation featuring contributors to and editors of The best American short stories 2012.

Participating in the conversation will be:

Jennifer Haigh is a novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction; Baker Towers won the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author; and her short stories have been featured in the Atlantic, Granta, and the Saturday Evening Post. Haigh's most recent novel is Faith.

Edith Pearlman is the author of 250 works of short fiction and nonfiction, which have been published in literary journals, anthologies, and online publications. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection, The Pushcart Prize, the New York Times, and Ploughshares. Pearlman was awarded the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature for her first collection of stories, Vaquita. Love Among the Greats, her second collection, won the Spokane Annual Fiction Prize. Her latest collection, Binocular Vision, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Tom Perrotta is a novelist and screenwriter. His novels Election and Little Children were made into Academy Award-nominated films. Perrotta has been featured on the New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, People Magazine, and National Public Radio. In 2010, his short story, "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face" was the Boston Book Festival's first One City One Story sElection. He has taught creative writing at Harvard University and Eckerd College, and he earned a BA in English from Yale University and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where he was a pupil of Tobias Wolff. Perrotta lives in Belmont. His latest novel is The Leftovers.

Heidi Pitlor is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Her fiction has been published in Ploughshares, and she is the author of the novel The birthdays.

Please note: This is an offsite event at the Middlesex Lounge.

Location: Street: Middlesex Lounge Additional: 315 Mass Ave City: Cambridge, Province: Massachusetts Postal Code: 02139 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)