Hanna Pylväinen is the author of the novel We Sinners, which won the Balcones Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal. She graduated summa cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, and received her MFA from the University of Michigan. She has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the University of Michigan, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Princeton University. She is an assistant professor of fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College.
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We SinnersA Novel
Her plan had been to clean in the middle of the night, so her mother would wake to an empty kitchen sink, but as she stood in the foyer, the bathroom fan beating loudly and uselessly, the mess before her made her want to cry; being in a family of eleven made her want to cry, the way someone had soaked up the dog’s pee but not thrown away the paper towel, the way responsibility divided by eleven meant no one was really responsible.
We Sinners:A Novel -
We SinnersA Novel
She was angry that now she had to be the mother with the gay son, the minister’s wife with the gay son—always she would carry the burden of Simon with her, the shame of having birthed something that could not be happy in this world, like the shame of mothers with retarded children, the burden of having to love something society feared, something repulsive to the world.
We Sinners:A Novel -
We SinnersA Novel
Still the beeping carried on, the room wearing thin now, and she could make out no particular person. The image came to her of her abdomen as prey, ants to jelly on the counter, jelly on the knife, and she thought about Abraham and Isaac, about Abraham tying Isaac to the table, and she wondered how long it took him, and did he tie Isaac carefully. She thought she would try to get up, but she couldn’t, she was bound, or her muscles were, and she said, or thought she said, I don’t want to die, as if to ask God Himself to hold the scalpel.
We Sinners:A Novel
“We Sinners is remarkably funny for a book about a deeply religious family grappling with loss of faith . . . It’s impossible not to like these characters, so beautifully drawn, and so very loving to one another.” —Los Angeles Times
“A beautiful, understated novel. [Pylväinen] tells a sophisticated, precise story about the nature and need for rebellion, set off against our need to belong. We Sinners hums with rare respect for religious outsiders.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“In some ways, the Rovaniemi family is like ordinary American families, with sibling rivalries, birth-order issues and parental expectations. But the questions about faith—how it binds the family together but also mutates and divides it—elevate it beyond the confines of the traditional domestic novel.” —Chicago Tribune [on We Sinners]
Selected Works
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