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THE LIFE SHE WISHED TO LIVE by Ann McCutchan follows the Washington, DC, born and Wisconsin educated Rawlings on her unlikely journey to The Yearling, which won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize and brought an unknown corner of America – the remote, hardscrabble communities of swampland Florida – to life. With access to Rawlings’s correspondence and revealing early writings, McCutchan uncovers a larger-than-life woman who writes passionately and with verve, whose emotions change on a dime, and who drinks to excess, smokes, swears, and even occasionally joins in on an alligator hunt. Kirkus celebrates the book as “an affectionate biography of the beloved author… an all-inclusive and intimate assessment that could help Rawlings attract a new generation of readers.”
Ann McCutchan is the author of six works of biography and memoir, including Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute and Where’s the Moon?: A Memoir of the Space Coast and the Florida Dream. The founding director of the University of Wyoming’s MFA in creative writing program and former editor of American Literary Review, McCutchan grew up in Florida and now lives in Wyoming.
SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE by Leslie Brodie has been lauded as “expansive and revealing” (New York Times); “engrossing and carefully researched” (Boston Globe); “a study that reveals the quiet subversiveness of Harriet the Spy and adds sharp political potency to the book’s seemingly innocent play with questions of secrecy and surveillance” (New Republic). As a children's author and a lesbian, Fitzhugh was often pressured to disguise her true nature – Brody tells the story of her hidden life and of the creation of her masterpiece, which remains long after her death as a testament to the complicated relationship between truth, secrecy, and individualism.
Leslie Brody is a biographer, playwright, and professor of creative writing. She adapted Harriet the Spy for the stage in 1988 and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a PEN America award for creative nonfiction. She has been an on-staff book columnist for Elle magazine. She lives in Redlands, California.
Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based critic and translator, and teaches journalism and criticism at The New School. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, and many other publications. She translates fiction and nonfiction from German, French, and Italian; recent works translated include Stella, by Takis Würger (Grove Atlantic), The Psychology of Stupidity, edited by Jean-François Marmion (Penguin), and Garden of Monsters, by Lorenza Pieri (Europa). . She is the author of the book Wordbirds, an illustrated lexicon of necessary neologisms for the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster).
