Thisbe Nissen – författare

As summer begins on Osprey Island, preparations at the Lodge -- the island’s one and only hotel — are underway for the busy season. On maintenance and housekeeping there’s Lance and Lorna Squire, Osprey locals and raging drinkers; and their irrepressible son Squee. There are college boys to wait tables and Irish girls to clean rooms. And a few unusual returnees, too: Suzy Chizek, single mom and daughter of the Lodge’s owners, who’s looking for a parentally funded vacation; and Roddy Jacobs, another former local, who has come back after a mysterious twenty-year absence. But when tragedy strikes, dark secrets explode, dividing the island community over the fate of a young boy suddenly more vulnerable to his violent father than ever. In the uniquely ephemeral atmosphere of a summer resort, Thisbe Nissen unfolds, with charecteristic warmth and charm, an ever-deepening story of lost loves and found romance, of loyalties and betrayals; and of lingering–sometimes fleeting–joy.From the Trade Paperback edition.

In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and conventional mores, these people-young, old, gay, straight, midwestern, coastal-are finding their own paths in learning who they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen's stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves together-to function, work, and survive-while endlessly yearning to be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and excruciating?How Other People Make Love contains nine stories. "Win's Girl" features a single woman who works at an Iowa slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to update the electric system in her dead parents' old house, only to be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately forces her to stand up for herself. In "Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass," a young woman flees after cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her decide what to do next. In "Unity Brought Them Together," a young man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish the Christmas cards his vacationing fiancée insists on sending, but winds up meeting another displaced young midwestern man there and going home with him instead. All these stories explore the question, "how do we love?" as well as the answers we find, discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and desperation. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren't right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires-all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.

';As gripping as it is hilarious.' Vanity Fair ';I devoured this novel . . . It just made my whole being vibrate and hum with the impossible, inevitable business of loving other people.' Leslie Jamison, New York Times best-selling author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering For Phillipa Maakestadtheater professor and mother to a troubled, volatile daughterlife is finally, miraculously calm.What better moment, then, to fall headlong into a passionate affair, fly off to France with her new lover, and effectively take a match to her life on the Iowa prairie? As she steps back to survey the damage and determine her way forward, Phillipa must contend with a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her otherwise docile husband. Which is to say: the damage is not easily contained, and the path ahead is not clear. Thisbe Nissen offers up a fever-pitched, bitingly funny novel about a woman's quest to find her place in her own story.Our Lady of the Prairie is a bravura performancea twister sweeping through the heart of the land and the land of the heart. ';Wonderfully witty.' Chicago Review of Books ';Brazen, sexy, and whip-smart.' Refinery29