Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2017 and was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Fiction. Her seventh novel, Someone, 2013, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and The Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Someone was also long-listed for the National Book Award. Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998 and was a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award. That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harpers, Commonweal and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, the Carington Award for Literary Excellence, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature. In 2013, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.
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That NightA Novel
It’s hard not to think of Sheryl’s mother as cruel in all this: hard not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked witch. She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to torment her boyfriend with these coy games. It was she who made sure her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye. No doubt Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her things together, from the airport, even, when she’d told her mother she wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead headed for the phones.
That Night:A Novel -
That NightA Novel
“I’m not even afraid of dying,” she told me, the cigarette at her lips. Her tone was pleasant but self-assured. She blew smoke upward into the air. “They showed us movies of these car accidents in school and it didn’t even bother me. Even Rick got nervous when he saw them, but I said, ‘So what? Everyone’s going to die.’ ” She looked at me carefully through the smoke and then sat back again, letting her head touch the railing. She wore a navy-blue scarf around her throat. One end was thrown behind her, the other hung down in front of her bright red shell. Except for a small bruise just above her scarf, what the Meyer twins had taught us to recognize as a love bite, her throat was as white as the inside of her wrist.
That Night:A Novel -
That NightA Novel
If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of the prairie or the plain, witness the reaction of a modern suburban family, nearly ready for bed, when the doorbell rings or the door is rattled. They will stop where they stand, or sit bolt upright in their beds, as if a streak of pure lightning has passed through the house. Eyes wide, voices fearful, they will whisper to one another, “There’s someone at the door,” in a way that might make you believe they have always feared and anticipated this moment—that they have spent their lives being stalked.
That Night:A Novel
“Fear and vulnerability, joy and passion, the capacity for love and pain and grief: Those are common to us all. Those are the things that great novelists explore. And it’s this exploration, made with tenderness, wisdom, and caritas, that’s at the heart of Alice McDermott’s masterpiece.” —Roxana Robinson, The Washington Post [on Someone]
"[A] wondrous new novel . . . Alice McDermott is a genius of quiet observation . . . Like Jane Austen, McDermott, one of our finest novelists writing today, is the master of a domain that in the hands of most writers would be limiting . . . Child of My Heart extends her artistic triumphs, and we should be grateful." —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Magical . . . Ms. McDermott's people, unlike so many characters in contemporary American fiction, are defined largely by their relationships to other family members, relationships that are delineated with unusual understanding of how emotional debts and gifts are handed down, generation to generation, and how that legacy creates a sense of continuity and continuance, a hedge against the erasures of time. In Charming Billy Ms. McDermott writes about such matters with wisdom and grace, refusing to sentimentalize her characters even as she forces us to recognize their decency and goodness. She has written a luminous and affecting novel.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"A strong, eloquent novel . . . McDermott writes clean, simple prose that serves her story beautifully. This novel is as carefully constructed as a poem, giving off a lustrous glow, and is poignant in the telling." —People [on That Night]
Selected Works
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