Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Readalikes
Liza Ward was born in New York City and holds degrees from Middlebury College and the University of Montana. Her stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Antioch Review, and other publications, and were selected for the 2004 O. Henry Prize Stories and Harcourt's 2004 Best New American Voices collection. She lives in Massachusetts.
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Your book is centered on the Charles Starkweather killing spree that
happened in 1957, before you were born. What drew you to this particular
story? What inspired you to write Outside Valentine?
In January of 1958, while my father was at boarding school on the east
coast, Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate pushed their way into my
grandparents' home and murdered them. My great aunt and uncle became my
father's legal guardians and moved into the house where he had had grown up. I
used to visit them in the summers, never making the connection that such
horrible things had happened inside those walls.
For so long I was consumed by my grandparents' death. The nature of their
death was the only thing I knew about my father's parents. This tragedy cast a
heavy silence over my family. No one ever talked about who they had been. I
spent a great deal of time hungrily combing books searching for any sort of
detail that would bring me closer to understanding what had happened. I tried
to remember the carpets at my great aunt's house, the arrangement of
furniture, the arrowheads my father had collected as a boy, wondering if the
murderers had noticed, run their ...
Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Outside Valentine
Try:
The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
William Kent Krueger is the award-winning author of a dozen Cork O'Connor novels, including Northwest Angle and Trickster's Point, as well as the novel Ordinary Grace. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family. (more)
If you enjoyed:
Outside Valentine
Try:
Ordinary Grace
by William Kent Krueger
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