Lynne Sharon Schwartz
March 24–25, 2008
Reading
Discussion
Bio
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is known for elegant and precise sentences, complex and thoughtful characters, and for telescopic range and microscopic focus. She is the author of nineteen books of fiction, nonfiction, translation and poetry. New York Magazine selected Schwartz's novel about September 11, 2001, The Writing on the Wall for its Best Literary Fiction Award in 2005. Schwartz has the ability to tell stories that would otherwise resist narration altogether. Her novel Rough Strife (1980), about the vicissitudes of a long marriage, was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award and a National Book Award. Leaving Brooklyn (1989), a coming-of-age novel, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Essays. Schwartz has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She is currently on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Disturbances in the Field, Schwartz's 1983 novel about loss, is known for its precision and humanity. The Kelly Writers House's own Max Apple, a renowned fiction writer himself, has said of Disturbances in the Field, "I have not been so wholly taken into an aura, a field, since I began being hypnotized by Dostoevski and Tolstoy and George Eliot ... I want to praise this book in every possible way."