“Here is a book that takes up beauty, longing, genius, and spirit—here is solitary thought, not looking to be answered, even by the thinker: an original book that leaves the reader less alone.”—Jean Valentine
“We’ve always believed that books were like a soundtrack to our lives and that our day to day lives stood in the foreground. But this stunning book tells a different and surprising tale: it is our lives that slip into the background, and books —those fabulous books that alter who we are—can become the real face of our lives.”—Andre Aciman
“In these gorgeous pages Kathleen Hill explores her own life, and the lives of family and friends, in the company of various novels. The result is a memoir filled with urgency as she struggles to read the world around her, to understand herself, and others, as deeply as Isabel Archer and Lucy Gayheart. This is a wonderful and profound book.” —Margot Livesey
“In this multi-faceted gem of a book, Kathleen Hill, a great reader, pays tribute to the masterworks of literature which have inspired her, and uses her prodigious memory and her lucid prose style to celebrate love and compassion as the most noble and enduring of human qualities.” — Colm Toibin
Kathleen Hill is the author of two previous novels. Her first novel, Still Waters in Niger was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. It was also selected for The Quality Paperback Book Club. The French translation, Eaux Tranquilles, was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger. Her second novel Who Occupies This House was an editor’s choice at the New York Times Book Review. One essay included in She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons was selected as one of the Best American Short Stories as well as The Pushcart Prize XXVand The Pushcart Book of Short Stories; another, published in Ploughshares, went on to be released in an Amazon Kindle that was selected as One of the Best Kindle Singles of 2014. She teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.
Joseph Olshan is an award-winning American novelist. His first novel, Clara's Heart, won the Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers' Competition and went on to be made into a feature film starring Whoopi Goldberg. He is the author of nine novels, the most recent of which, Cloudland, was published in 2013. During the 1990's he was a regular contributor of book reviews to the Wall Street Journal. For six years was a professor of Creative Writing at New York University where he taught both graduate and undergraduate courses. He is currently the editorial director of Delphinium Books/HarperCollins.
