Lily King grew up in Massachusetts and received her BA in English Literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her MA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She has taught English and Creative Writing at several universities and high schools in this country and abroad. Lily’s first novel, The Pleasing Hour (1999) won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second, The English Teacher (2005), was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. Her third novel, Father of the Rain (2010), was a New York Times Editors Choice, a Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year and winner of both the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Maine Fiction Award. It was translated into various languages. Lily's new novel, Euphoria, was released in June 2014. It won the 2014 Kirkus Prize in Fiction, the New England Book Award for Fiction 2014, and has hit numerous summer reading lists from The Boston Globe to O Magazine and USA Today. Reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, Emily Eakin called Euphoria, “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace.” The novel is being translated into numerous languages and a feature film is underway. Lily is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train, as well as in several anthologies.
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The Pleasing HourA Novel
The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, “Right cheek first,” which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children—sour milk and butter cookies.
THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
The Pleasing Hour:A Novel -
The Pleasing HourA Novel
It wasn’t a week after the Liberation before they came for her. They had come for so many that there was no shock. Her children knew—Monique had suspected it from the very beginning, as soon as Brigitte’s pink toy reappeared. It was only Octave who protested in earnest… he struggled with the intruders, demanded to know the accusations, and received a swift blow to his jaw from the butt end of a Resistance rifle.
It was his daughter Juliette, the silent one, who told him. She fetched a warm cloth for his wound. “Maman was with a German.” Was with, not helped. Not the Germans but a German.
THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
The Pleasing Hour:A Novel -
The Pleasing HourA Novel
This became routine: the three of us remaining, long after our lunch plates had been cleared, beneath the thatched canopy of this restaurant on the beach where waiters in shiny black shoes slogged through the white sand from table to table. What do they make of us? I wondered one afternoon when the rosado had taken a particular hold, convincing me that our table with the pale pink cloth and blue-lipped tumblers must be the center of their world. I was certain they knew I was not French, that I was the jeune fille, that yesterday when Nicole had gone up to their room for a dry towel Marc had followed me into the ladies’ room…
THE PLEASING HOUR © 1999 by Lily King; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
The Pleasing Hour:A Novel
“Euphoria is a meticulously researched homage to [Margaret] Mead’s restless mind and a considered portrait of Western anthropology in its primitivist heyday. It’s also a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace—a love triangle in extremis . . . The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic . . . and King’s signal achievement may be to have created satisfying drama out of a quest for interpretive insight . . . King is brilliant on the moral contradictions that propelled anthropological encounters with remote tribes . . . In King’s exquisite book, desire—for knowledge, fame, another person—is only fleetingly rewarded.” —Emily Eakin, The New York Times Book Review
"Spellbinding . . . Marvelous . . . A story of high drama in the court of Nixon-era New England aristocracy . . . You won't be able to stop reading this book, but when you do finally finish the last delicious page and look up, you will see families in a clearer and more forgiving way." —Susan Cheever, Vanity Fair [on Father of the Rain]
“Beautifully wrought . . . what people do to each other and the legacies they leave are King's central subjects, and in her deft hands they're explored in complicated, ambitious ways that leave us feeling as if we've become fluent in a foreign language.” —Karen Shepard, USA Today [on The Pleasing Hour]
Selected Works
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