Amy Bloom – författare

Amy Bloom was nominated for a National Book Award for her first collection, Come to Me, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Antaeus, and other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In her new collection, she enhances her reputation as a true artist of the form.Here are characters confronted with tragedy, perplexed by emotions, and challenged to endure whatever modern life may have in store. A loving mother accompanies her daughter in her journey to become a man, and discovers a new, hopeful love. A stepmother and stepson meet again after fifteen years and a devastating mistake, and rediscover their familial affection for each other. And in "The Story," a widow bent on seducing another woman''s husband constructs and deconstructs her story until she has "made the best and happiest ending" possible "in this world."From the Trade Paperback edition.

National Book Award finalist Amy Bloom has written a tale of growing up that is sharp and funny, rueful and uncompromisingly real.  A chubby girl with smudged pink harlequin glasses and a habit of stealing Heath Bars from the local five-and-dime, Elizabeth Taube is the only child of parents whose indifference to her is the one sure thing in her life.   When her search for love and attention leads her into the arms of her junior-high-school English teacher, things begin to get complicated.   And even her friend Mrs. Hill, a nearly blind, elderly black woman, can''t protect her when real love--exhilarating, passionate, heartbreaking--enters her life in the gorgeous shape of Huddie Lester.  With her finely honed style and her unflinching sensibility, Bloom shows us how profoundly the forces of love and desire can shape a life.  From the Trade Paperback edition.

A unique offer for fans of Amy Bloom, bestselling author of Away...sample just one piece from her stunning new collection of interconnected short stories. Available at this special price for a limited time only.Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through New York Times bestselling author Amy Bloom’s astonishing and astute new work. Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreakingly funny, Where the God of Love Hangs Out illuminates the mysteries of love, family, and friendship. In the haunting story Between Here and Here, a daughter reluctantly steps in to take care of the infirm father she hated for so many years. As a tribute to her late mother, and to show that she is a better person than her father, she gives everything she has to this terrible old man and revises history. Between Here and Here and the eleven other stories that comprise Where the God of Love Hangs Out showcase stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, that beautifully capture deep human truths.

Fall head over heels with this collection of unconventionaland heartfelt romances that will leave you longing for more. From icons offeminist literature to forgotten Chinese modernists, these women writers chartevolutions of love across lifetimes, from the first flush of youth to growingold together. This new anthology gathers the talents of Margaret Atwood,Virginia Woolf, Amy Bloom, E. M. Delafield, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Taylor,Mary Lavin, Ling Shuhua, Jessamyn West and Carol Shields.This anthology brings together forgotten and celebratedfemale masters of the short story format. In the spirit of the Women Writersseries, these stories first appeared in books and periodicals published in thetwentieth century. The result is a carefully curated collection of stories thatsketch evolving understandings of love and female agency, as their heroinesnavigate romance and commitment, idealism and realism, innocence andexperience.

Journalist, psychotherapist and novelist Amy Bloom explores sex and gender through portraits of people who are widely considered not normal - transsexuals, crossdressers, hermaphrodites - a group of people larger and more 'normal' than most of us would imagine. There are men like Hale, a 'regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy' with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Mothers like Jessie, who realised that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help him make the transgender transition. And couples like Peggy and her husband, 'Melanie', who holiday on cruise ships along with fellow heterosexual crossdressers. Bloom cuts through the psychology by showing us these people as they really are and in their own words. This intimate portrait reinvents the idea of sex, gender, and identity, and the very concept of being 'normal'.

For readers of The Paris Wife and The Swans of Fifth Avenue comes a love story inspired by “one of the most intriguing relationships in history”*—between Eleanor Roosevelt and “first friend” Lorena Hickok. Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, “Hick,” as she’s known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have. She moves into the White House, where her status as “first friend” is an open secret, as are FDR’s own lovers. After she takes a job in the Roosevelt administration, promoting and protecting both Roosevelts, she comes to know Franklin not only as a great president but as a complicated rival and an irresistible friend, capable of changing lives even after his death. Through it all, even as Hick’s bond with Eleanor is tested by forces both extraordinary and common, and as she grows as a woman and a writer, she never loses sight of the love of her life.  From Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, from a little white house on Long Island to an apartment on Manhattan’s Washington Square, Amy Bloom’s new novel moves elegantly through fascinating places and times, written in compelling prose and with emotional depth, wit, and acuity. Advance praise for White Houses “Amy Bloom brings an untold slice of history so dazzlingly and devastatingly to life, it took my breath away.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife “A novel of the secret, scandalous love of Eleanor Roosevelt and her longtime friend and companion Lorena Hickok, who relates the tale in her own, quite wonderful voice.”—Joyce Carol Oates “Lorena Hickok is a woman who found love with another lost soul, Eleanor Roosevelt. And love is what this book is all about: It suffuses every page, so that by the time you reach the end, you are simply stunned by the beauty of the world these two carved out for themselves.”—Melanie Benjamin, author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue*

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times). Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck.  Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star and Eva the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island.   With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine though a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with gorgeous writing, memorable characters, and surprising events, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, the creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life, conventional and otherwise. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people love, lie, cheat and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.Praise for Lucky Us“Lucky Us is a remarkable accomplishment. One waits a long time for a novel of this scope and dimension, replete with surgically drawn characters, a mix of comedy and tragedy that borders on the miraculous, and sentences that should be in a sentence museum. Amy Bloom is a treasure.”—Michael Cunningham“Exquisite . . . a short, vibrant book about all kinds of people creating all kinds of serial, improvisatory lives.”—The New York Times   “Bighearted, rambunctious . . . a bustling tale of American reinvention . . . If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity.”—The Washington Post   “Bloom’s crisp, delicious prose gives [Lucky Us] the feel of sprawling, brawling life itself. . . . Lucky Us is a sister act, which means a double dose of sauce and naughtiness from the brilliant Amy Bloom.”—The Oregonian   “A tasty summer read that will leave you smiling . . . Broken hearts [are] held together by lipstick, wisecracks and the enduring love of sisters.”—USA Today   “Exquisitely imagined . . . [a] grand adventure.”—O: The Oprah Magazine   “Marvelous picaresque entertainment . . . a festival of joy and terror and lust and amazement that resolves itself here, warts and all, in a kind of crystalline Mozartean clarity of vision.”—ElleFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

In these stories we meet more of Amy Bloom's irresistible characters: a woman recovering from cancer while her best friend and husband face their loneliness and a new friendship; a mother coming to know that her wonderful little girl is a boy; a man and his stepmother in a complicated dance of memory, anger and forgiveness.These are stories on the frontiers of emotions, stories about the uncertain gestures of love, the betrayals of the flesh and the surprises of the heart.'Connectedness, or the lack of it, is the theme of nearly all the stories . . . They are small masterpieces' Sunday Times 'Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books' New Yorker 'Any new book by Amy Bloom is a cause for celebration and this fabulously titled collection of stories is no exception... Bloom, already hailed as one of the best short story writers of her generation, is wickedly knowing with the sort of perfectly paced writing which can blow the reader away with the tiniest detail' The Times

This stunning collection of stories takes us into the inner worlds of families, the hidden corners of marriages and affairs and friendships, and introduces us to people whose lives are shaken and changed by love: a grieving mother in need of comfort; a frightened father in need of redemption; wives who become mistresses and regret it, or don’t; a psychiatrist crashing through professional boundaries to provide for her husband and son.Amy Bloom holds her characters close to us as they encounter the everyday mysteries of need and desire, showing us tenderness and humour in the midst of grief and sorrow. She writes the kind of fiction that celebrates the flawed dignity of the human and reminds us all of the fine venture of living in grace and hope in the worlds we are born to and make.

Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, and the same qualities distinguish Normal, a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of “people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic”—female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, “Melanie,” who devote themselves to the cause of “ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension.” And we meet Hale Hawbecker, “a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy” with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender and identity, Bloom reveals new facets to the ideas of happiness, personality and character, even as she brilliantly illuminates the very concept of "normal.”From the Trade Paperback edition.

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work–her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart–come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

BONUS: This edition contains a Where the God of Love Hangs Out discussion guide.Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection by Amy Bloom, theNew York Times bestselling author of Away. Bloom’s astonishing and astute stories illuminate the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship. A young woman is haunted by her roommate’s murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places; two middle-aged, married friends find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all for their love but never underestimating the cost. Propelled by Bloom’s dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of people’s emotional lives, exploring the changes that come with love and loss. Look for special features inside.Join the Circle for author chats and more.RandomHouseReadersCircle.com

"In an Ivy League town, Bloom turns Yale''s motto—Lux et Veritas—on its head, finding darkness and deceit in every corner of New Haven." —Kirkus Reviews The image of a charming college town serves New Haven well, but its natives know that the city has been built on a rich—and violent—history that still seeps out from between the cracks in the sidewalks and the halls of learning. Now, New York Times–bestselling author—and Connecticut resident—Amy Bloom masterfully curates a star-studded cast of contributors, featuring Michael Cunningham, Stephen L. Carter, and Roxana Robinson, to portray New Haven''s underbelly. Highlights of the anthology include Lisa D. Gray''s "The Queen of Secrets," which won the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award and John Crowley''s "Spring Break," winner of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Tales by Alice Mattison, Chris Knopf, Jonathan Stone, Sarah Pemberton Strong, Karen E. Olson, Jessica Speart, Chandra Prasad, David Rich, Hirsh Sawhney, and Bloom herself round out this impressive collection. "Town-gown tensions highlight several of the 15 stories in this stellar Akashic noir anthology set in the Elm City . . . This [volume] is particularly strong on established authors, many of whom have impressive credentials outside the genre." —Publishers Weekly, starred review "The anthology brings together writers who take varied approaches to the idea of noir in the Elm City. Some stories are historical, some are contemporary. All the classic New Haven landmarks are there, including plenty of Yale . . . The full sweep of New Haven''s character is on display in the anthology." —Connecticut Magazine

In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok - Hick to friends - a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives. Told by the indomitable Hick, White Houses is the story of Eleanor and Hick's hidden love, and of Hick's unlikely journey from her dirt-poor childhood to the centre of privilege and power. Filled with fascinating back-room politics, the secrets and scandals of the era, and exploring the potency of enduring love, it is an imaginative tour-de-force from a writer of extraordinary and exuberant talent.

Amy Bloom has long been regarded as a master of the short story form. Here, her brilliance shines across two decades and more than twenty-five stories. From the bereaved widow who finds unexpected comfort in 'Sleepwalking', to the matchmaking shrink in 'Psychoanalysis Changed My Life'; from the teenage girl furious at her dying mother in 'Hold Tight' to the transgressive lovers of 'The Gates Are Closing'; from the married friends irresistibly drawn to one another in 'William and Clare' to the brave and heartless girl in 'Permafrost' - these are stories brimming with life and grief, erotically charged and beautifully crafted.