C. E. Morgan’s first novel, All the Living, won the Weatherford Award as the outstanding fiction work depicting Appalachia and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway First Fiction Book Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award in Fiction. Her second novel, The Sport of Kings, was the winner of a 2016 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Morgan is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellow award, and a 2013 Whiting Award in Fiction. She studied English and voice at Berea College, holds an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and lives in Kentucky.
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All the LivingA Novel
He grimaced out at the fields and she saw the deep elevens etched between his eyes, eyes that were the color of the sky and just as distant. He looked to her like a thing seized, as if all his old self had been suckered up from his body proper and forced into the small, staring space of his eyes. She did not like those new blinkless eyes of his and she did not like the way his words all collapsed in his new way of talking. As if his tongue could not bear the weight of words any longer.
All the Living:A Novel -
All the LivingA Novel
She hesitated, her hands hovering above the keys. Then she played. And she played, not with the smoothness that she’d possessed two months ago—the last time she’s played from any of the scores—but with a surging and unsteady need that had not been there before. As her fingers found their home, clumsy at first but quick to confidence, her body rocked back and forth unaware on the bench like a child finding its comfort. She played and played.
All the Living:A Novel -
All the LivingA Novel
She went upstairs and sat on the bed in her clothes, but she did not lie down. She studied the dark room about her. Her mind strove for a place to rest, but could not settle. The lonesomest thing she knew, her childhood, rose before her like a shade, but she shooed it way with a blink of her dark-accustomed eyes.
All the Living:A Novel
“A first novel so self-assured and unto itself, so unswerving in its purpose, so strummed through with a peculiar, particular, electrifying sound, that I found myself reading in a state of highest perplexity, and also gratitude and awe.” —Chicago Tribune [on All the Living]
"Rarely in this reviewer's memory has a debut novel emerged with such a profound sense of place . . . Descriptions are so vivid, yet so integrated and organic, that the reader can almost feel the lassitude of stifling humid air; smell the rich, warm earth; and see the furrowed fields, the dark mountains in the distance . . . A slow, seductive dive into another time and place, a deep, quiet place." —Karen Campbell, The Boston Globe [on All the Living]
"Those who read for character and landscape will feast on C. E. Morgan’s uncommon debut . . . Fans of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead will appreciate Morgan’s sureness with scripture and her skill with characters for whom scripture matters." —Karen Long, The Cleveland Plain Dealer [on All the Living]
Selected Works
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“This is a visionary, luminous novel. Morgan’s prose has both biblical and Southern literary echoes, patient, idiosyncratic, unique. Rather than Gothic, the feel is of a Greek drama. The novel is a landscape, with a deep, loamy, fantastic sense of place — the roots go deep. The writing is haunting and fabulously assured, the voice strong enough that one can almost imagine being able to pick up a book in the future and know from the first lines it is hers. She is a mature, wise, accomplished writer.”