Alison Armstrong – författare

Five of my narrating voices are male, middle aged to elderly. Their accents varyan East Coast American professor in Driving, Oxbridge is British with a tinge of Irish in Hippo Club, Mose Konen, and The Man in the Apple-Green Tie. And for the narrator of Ostraneni, the reader may imagine the dialect of a member of the elite of ancient fifth century BC Athens. Four of these monologues are in a female voice: the elderly womans aggressive/defensive voice of Gazelle came to me in a dream shortly after I had moved to New York City to live in the early 1980s, the naive voice of a Midwestern girl recounts a childhood trauma in Snakedoctors, a subdued young woman tells of her relationship to her parents in At the Lake House, and Bronze Age Greek accents of Ismenethe lonely, hysteric, forgotten princess of Thebes and sister to Antigonein the eponymous tragedy by Sophocles, again, invite imagination. That is how I hear them.

These stories are the result of imagination stimulated by lessons learned from various creatures, both wild and tame, who understand the immutable and eternal laws of the Natural world and in whom justice and truth are innate.

When twelve-year-old Sherrie-Lee witnesses a failed bank robbery in her neglected town, she seizes an opportunity to claim a new identity for herself. Escaping her troubled home life, she tries out a new name and invents stories and personas to cover her tracks.Sherrie-Lee finds both possibility and loneliness in this new freedom, as well as an unusual friendship which she nurtures. But harsh realities close in, and she’s plagued with foreboding – from her vulnerable brother at home to the climate crisis. While she dreams of a kinder world, it won’t be long before her own deceits start catching up with her.This arresting debut challenges assumptions and captures the powerless yearning of adolescence with a voice that is fresh, magnetic and often funny – one that pulls you in and won’t let go.

Alison Armstrong's involvement with Anglo-Irish literature has resulted in a literary cooking, The Joyce of Cooking (Station Hill Press, 1986) and a volume of textual scholarship, "e;The Herne's Egg"e; by W.B. Yeats: the Manuscript Materials (Cornell University Press, 1993). Her essays, stories, poetry, and reviews have appeared in various publications, including American Arts Quarterly, BOMB, Exquisite Corpse, Sea Kayaker, Notre Dame Review, PN Review. Recent titles published with Xlibris are Gazelle: 9 Monologues (2017; 2018), Pentimenti: Selected Memoirs (2018), Healing Fictions: Assorted Essays on Literature & Art (2018), and Two Fables (2020). She teaches in the Humanities Department at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.