Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Renie Manfredi received her MFA from Indiana University, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a regional winner of Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40. Her short story collection, Where Love Leaves Us, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her short stories have been published in The Mississippi Review, The Iowa Review, The Georgia Review, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and featured in NPR's "Selected Shorts" series.
Her other works include Above the Thunder, and Running Away with Frannie. Above the Thunder was awarded a Booksense/Independent Bookseller award and translated into Russian, Danish, Turkish, and several other languages.
Renée Manfredi's website
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All your characters struggle with loss, yet they all in their own way refuse
to surrender to it. Did that come as a surprise to you?
Every fictional character I can think of is defined by loss; there's no
novel in which all the characters have plenty of everything. Yet some of the
writers I most admire—Jane Austen, Michael Cunningham, Anne-Marie
MacDonald—provide hope in equal measure with loss. This is what I wanted for my
characters.
Your eleven-year-old heroine is such an independent and captivating girl.
Where did Flynn come from?
In the early drafts of the novel, Flynn was a fairly typical child.
Because she was so hyper attuned to her environment, though, she began to draw in
the other characters' strong emotions, and she became the one who always spoke
the truth, even if the truth was more emotional than factual. Her eccentricity
emerged in part from her tendency to say what the others were unable or
unwilling to express.
Your novel isn't a comic one, yet a few of your scenes are extremely funny.
How do humor and tragedy co-exist so comfortably in your writing?
I think humor is a survival strategy. Some of my characters get through
tragedy in moments of high ...
Julia Glass is the author of six previous books of fiction, including the bestselling Three Junes, winner of the National Book Award, and I See You Everywhere, winner of the Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Above The Thunder
Try:
Three Junes
by Julia Glass
Elizabeth Graver's fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose tumultuous and shape-shifting life journey took ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Above The Thunder
Try:
The End of the Point
by Elizabeth Graver
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