Beth Ann Fennelly – författare

From the author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter - winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the YearApril 1927. After months of rain, the Mississippi River has reached dangerous levels and the little town of Hobnob is at threat. Residents fear the levee will either explode under the pressure of the water or be blown by saboteurs from New Orleans, who wish to save their own city. But when an orphaned baby is found the lives of Ingersoll, a blues-playing prohibition agent, and Dixie Clay, a bootlegger who is guarding a terrible secret, collide. They can little imagine how events are about to change them - and the great South - forever. For in the dead of night, after thick, illusory fog, the levee will break . . .

Beth Ann Fennelly is fearless in delineating the joys, absorptions, and—yes—jealousies of new motherhood. Having studied motherhood "as if for an exam," reality proved "wilder and deeper and funnier" than anything she'd anticipated.Tender Hooks is Fennelly's spirited exploration of parenting, with all its contradictions and complexities.

Beth Ann Fennelly, writing to a newly pregnant friend, goes beyond the nuts and bolts or sentimentality of other parenting literature, in letters that range in tone from serious to sisterly, from lighthearted to downright funny. Some answer specific questions; others muse about the identity shift a woman encounters when she enters Mommyland. This book invites all mothers to join the grand circle of giving and receiving advice about children.

Hailed as “a brilliant blueprint of the imagination” (David Baker), Open House established Beth Ann Fennelly as “an ambitious and spacious young talent” (Paul Zimmer) and introduced us to her “passion, compassion, inventiveness, and intelligence” (Alison Hawthorne Deming).

The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of non-fiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys.Some pieces are wistful, some wry and many reveal the humour buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments and awakens us to these moments as they appear in the margins of our lives.

What can we learn from an ordinary life observed with extraordinary skill? In The Irish Goodbye, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother and daughter in precise sentences. The longer essays concern Fennelly’s relationships–with a beloved mother-in-law, a decades-long friendship between former college roommates, an artist who paints a series of nude portraits in Fennelly’s town. Interspersed between these longer memoirs are sections of flash non-fiction, a form Fennelly innovated. With dazzling verve and wit, they capture the interstitial interactions–encounters with strangers, quirky observations, unexpected flights of fancy–that make up a richly lived life. With emotional clarity and nimble prose, Fennelly invites readers to share her affirming worldview–one in which even our smallest interactions are rife with possibility.Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating and Cooling was praised as:“A surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life.” — New York Times Book Review“The micro-memoirs showcase a range of emotions that belies their brevity—taken from another standpoint, their brevity is what gives them power.” — The Wall Street Journal