Jill Bialosky – författare

The strongest collection yet from this widely praised poet is about the central players in our lives, our relationships over time—between mother and son, mother and daughter—and how one generation of relationships informs and shapes the next.The opening sequence, “Manhood,” looks at the insular world of baseball, shedding light on the complexities of gender, boyhood, and coming-of-age. The poet captures the electrifying, proud language of baseball talk, channeling the tone and approach of the young men she observes as a mother, and bringing poignancy and deeper understanding to the transaction between herself and the young men she sees growing into adulthood. “American Comedy” is a sonnet sequence about the absurdities and realities of modern domestic life, while figures in literature are the players in “Interlude.” The final section, “The Players,” becomes a forceful and searing revelation about the legacy of generations.  Exploring the nature of attachment on many levels, The Players brings us Jill Bialosky at her best, in poems that find a new language to describe the rich and universal story that is modern motherhood.

Eleanor Cahn is a professor of literature, the wife of a preeminent cardiac surgeon, and a devoted mother. But on a trip to Paris to present a paper on Anna Karenina, Eleanor re-connects with Stephen—a childhood friend with whom she has had a complicated relationship—that forces her to realize that she has suppressed her passionate self for years. As the novel unfolds, we learn of her hidden erotic past: with alluring, elusive Stephen; with ethereal William, her high school boyfriend; with married, egotistical Adam, the painter who initiated her into the intimacies of the "life room," where the artist’s model sometimes becomes muse; and with loyal, steady Michael, her husband. On her return to New York, Eleanor and Stephen’s charged attraction takes on a life of its own and threatens to destroy everything she has.

Jill Bialosky has created a fresh, piercingly real heroine who struggles with the spiritual questions and dilemmas of our time and, like Tolstoy’s immortal Anna Karenina, must choose between desire and responsibility.

What do we prize most? Are integrity and ambition mutually exclusive, as we seek a place in the world? How do we ultimately value a piece of art—or a life? These are the questions at the core of the evocative new novel by bestselling author Jill Bialosky.

Edward Darby has everything a man could hope for: meaningful work, a loving wife, and a beloved daughter. With a rising career as a partner at an esteemed gallery, he strives not to let ambition, money, power, and his dark past corrode the sanctuary of his domestic and private life.

Influenced by his father, a brilliant Romantics scholar, Edward has always been more of a purist than an opportunist. But when a celebrated artist controlled by her insecurities betrays him—and another very different artist awakens his heart and stirs up secrets from his past—Edward will find himself unmoored from his marriage, his work, and the memory of his beloved father. And when the finalists of an important prize are announced, creating desperate maneuvering among artists seeking validation, Edward soon learns that betrayal comes in many forms, and he may be hurtling toward an act that challenges his own notions about what comprises a life worth living.

A compelling odyssey of a man unhinged by his ideals, The Prize is also an unflinching portrait of a marriage struggling against the corroding tide of time and the proximity to the treacherous fault line between art and money.

An explosive tale of art and myth, desire and betrayal, from New York Times best-selling author Jill BialoskySomething terrible has happened and I don’t know what to do. An unnamed narrator’s life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys’ prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum’s austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft. As secret betrayals and deceptions come to light and rage threatens to overwhelm her, the pantheon of gods assume remarkably vivid lives of their own, forcing her to choose between reality and myth in an effort to free herself from the patriarchal constraints of the past and embrace a new vision for her future. The Deceptions is a page-turning and seductively told exploration of female sexuality and ambition as well as a human drama that dares to test the stories we tell ourselves. It is also a brilliant investigation of a life caught between the dueling magnetic poles of privacy and its appropriation in art and literature. Celebrated poet, memoirist, and novelist Jill Bialosky has reached new and daring heights in her boldest work yet.

“It is so nice to be happy. It always gives me a good feeling to see other people happy … It is so easy to achieve.” —Kim’s journal entry, May 3, 1988

On the night of April 15, 1990, Jill Bialosky’s twenty-one-year-old sister Kim came home from a bar in downtown Cleveland. She argued with her boyfriend on the phone. Then she took her mother’s car keys, went into the garage, and closed the garage door. She climbed into the car, turned on the ignition, and fell asleep. Her body was found the next morning by the neighborhood boy her mother hired to cut the grass.

Those are the simple facts, but the act of suicide is anything but simple. For twenty years, Bialosky has lived with the grief, guilt, questions, and confusion unleashed by Kim’s suicide. Now, in a remarkable work of literary nonfiction, she re-creates with unsparing honesty her sister’s inner life, the events and emotions that led her to take her life on this particular night. In doing so, she opens a window on the nature of suicide itself, our own reactions and responses to it—especially the impact a suicide has on those who remain behind.

Combining Kim’s diaries with family history and memoir, drawing on the works of doctors and psychologists as well as writers from Melville and Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens, Bialosky gives us a stunning exploration of human fragility and strength. She juxtaposes the story of Kim’s death with the challenges of becoming a mother and her own exuberant experience of raising a son. This is a book that explores all aspects of our familial relationships—between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters—but particularly the tender and enduring bonds between sisters.

History of a Suicide brings a crucial and all too rarely discussed subject out of the shadows, and in doing so gives readers the courage to face their own losses, no matter what those may be. This searing and compassionate work reminds us of the preciousness of life and of the ways in which those we love are inextricably bound to us.

A novel by an acclaimed American poet, House under Snow is a story of mothers and daughters, of sexual identity, and a family slowly disintegrating after the premature death of its patriarch.

Anna Crane, soon to be married, reflects back on her childhood in Ohio during the 1960s and ‘70s with her two sisters and her charismatic, self-destructing mother. Evoking the claustrophobia of small-town life, Anna’s first passionate love affair with a troubled boy who works as a groom and trainer at a horse track, and her mother’s endless stream of suitors and a failed marriage, the novel races toward a chilling conclusion when Anna is betrayed by the two most important figures in her young life.

An unforgettable tale of the power and vulnerability of sex and family, history and the past, House under Snow is a lyrical and brilliant work of fiction.