Micheline Aharonian Marcom – författare

A woman’s sexual awakening is a tragedy when the woman is married to someone other than the man who awakens her. But until then, her marriage, now doomed, was a sleepwalker’s tragedy. This novel will shock and offend some readers. Unapologetically explicit in its language, extreme in some of the acts it catalogues, it makes no pretense of submission to middle-class decency, let alone to expectations of happy endings. All three people in this love triangle are flawed, damaged, human. Things fall apart, and the resolution is unclear. Why does she do it? Why should we read it? The answer is one word: Ecstasy. Micheline Aharonian Marcom has a genius for language that is not only beautiful in and of itself, but also engages the heart. Lusher than Marguerite Duras, more tender and erotic than Cormac McCarthy, but nearly as dark, this is a narrative masterpiece.

Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, "A Brief History of Yes"--her first since 2008's scathing and erotic "The Mirror in the Well"--as a "literary fado," referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling of "saudade"--meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irreparably lost. "A Brief History of Yes" tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American literature has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.

Small Pieces is a collaboration between novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom and writer and visual artist Fowzia Karimi, pairing Marcom’s short stories—miniatures as Marcom calls them—with Karimi's watercolors. The work is a conversation between two artists in text and image, side by side.