Lucy Ferriss – författare

Celebrated by writers including Jonathan Franzen, who said that “[t]his crazy, gorgeous family novel is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century," The Man Who Loved Children is a 1940 novel by Australian writer Christina Stead. The harrowing portrait of a dysfunctional family, the novel focuses on the relationship between the father, Sam, a tyrannical crank far removed from the civilized man he thinks himself to be, his bitter wife, Henny, and their six children, particularly eldest daughter, Louie. Considering a contemporary classic, The Man Who Loved Children was named one of the the 100 greatest novels of all time by Time magazine.

In her entry in Ig''s acclaimed Bookmarked series, author Lucy Ferriss juxtaposes the egoism and brutality of Sam with the behavior of her own father, using his dairies to give the reader an intimate and devastating portrait of their father-daughter relationship. Ferriss also shares how The Man Who Loved Children influenced her own creativity and development as a writer, as well as taking on male critics of the novel-including Franzen-to get to the true feminist heart of what Time called "the greatest picture of the lousiest family of all time."

How far do we have to travel to come face to face with ourselves?

Foreign Climes is a collection of short stories linked by place, or more exactly by the strangeness of new places, new territories both geographical and psychological. It proceeds from a young person''s sense of boundaries to an older person''s breaking through boundaries-and then beyond, to a voice that constructs the world by way of possibilities both found and left unexplored.

Some of the stories take their protagonists literally to strange, unsteady ground. A teenaged narrator travels from leafy North Carolina to the desert to engage in battle against a boy he calls "Minnesota," a stand-in for a greater battle against his parents'' dissolving marriage. A young Pashtun woman from northern Pakistan finds herself in cold New England amid the overwhelming landscape of her own desire. An American working abroad struggles to find her place in a relationship that seems unbound by language.

Other stories encounter alienation closer to home. A swaggering poker shark confronts a brutality unleashed by the exploitive nature of his world. A woman leaving her marriage finds an entire life in the lineaments of a house she''ll never inhabit. A mother crosses a chasm to reach a son steeped in mania.

"People don''t change," the poet Charles Olsen wrote. "They only stand more revealed." These stories reveal the heart and the potential of the people within them by thrusting them into those places of discomfort and exhilaration that leave us all naked before the world.

Afia Satar is studious, modest, and devout. The young daughter of a landholding family in northern Pakistan, Afia has enrolled in an American college with the dream of returning to her country as a doctor. But when a photo surfaces online of Afia holding hands with an American boy, she is suddenly no longer safe-even from the family that cherishes her. An ambitious athlete, Shahid Satar has been entrusted by his family to watch over Afia in this strange New England landscape. Having convinced their parents to allow his sister to come to the U.S., Shahid wants only to focus, right now, on the win over Harvard that could clinch a job for him in the United States. He never imagined he'' d be ordered, instead, to cleanse family honor with his sister'' s blood.

This fresh release of an epochal novel from the late 1990s unlocks the dystopic world of the United States circa 2026, when Roe v. Wade has been overturned and abortion finally banned in all 50 states. Following in the steps of her dead sister and mother, narrator Phoebe Masters works in the computer industry by day and at night performs illegal "misconceptions" in her basement, restoring to desperate women some measure of control over their own bodies. Outside, technology has progressed but social change has moved backward. Married women tend to stay home. Amniocentesis is illegal. The worst punishment for rape is a paternity suit. Homosexuality is back in the closet.

           Yet despite her profession, despite the connection she sees between her job stamping out malware and her illicit vocation terminating pregnancies, Phoebe holds few political beliefs-until a love affair forces her to choose between closing herself off and revealing her secret. Betrayed, arrested, and jailed, she begins to confront the multiple contradictions of her world. Eventually she must choose- between revenge and forgiveness, family and self, guilt and accountability, love and action.

While The Misconceiver initially presents its characters'' repression matter-of-factly, the accretion of detail concerning their emotional and physical pain makes this far more than a merely political novel. Phoebe is fiercely loyal to the memory of her sister but anxious for her own freedom. Haunted by memory and hunted by the law, she begins to find her true self even as she sheds her old identity. Set in a future that is not far-fetched but well within the range of our imagination, The Misconceiver not only addresses a vivid issue of our time but also brings to life characters and relationships that could well be ours, just over the horizon of time.