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Kate Racculia Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Kate Racculia

Kate Racculia

How to pronounce Kate Racculia: ruh-KYOOL-ee-uh

Kate Racculia Biography

Kate Racculia is a novelist living in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the novels This Must Be the Place and Bellweather Rhapsody, winner of the American Library Association's Alex Award. Her third novel, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019.

Kate was a teenage bassoonist in her hometown of Syracuse, and studied illustration, design, Jane Austen, and Canada at the University of Buffalo. She moved to Boston to get her MFA from Emerson College, and stuck around for 11 years. She has been a cartoonist, a planetarium operator, a movie and music reviewer, a coffee jerk, a bookseller, a designer, a finance marketing proposal writer, and a fundraising prospect researcher. She teaches online for Grub Street, works at her local public library, and sings in the oldest Bach choir in America.

Kate Racculia's website

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Interview

Quick facts about Kate Racculia whose first novel, This Must Be The Place, received starred reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews.

Where are you from?
Syracuse, New York

Who are your favorite writers?
I love Kate Atkinson, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Jane Smiley, Richard Russo—I could go on.  And there's nothing in the world like a vintage Stephen King and a glass of iced tea on a lazy summer day.

Which book/books have had the biggest influence on your writing?
Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game blew my 10-year-old mind with its multiple characters, multiple plots, multiple red herring, try-to-solve-it-yourself mystery.  And years later, John Irving's The World According to Garp was an object lesson in absolutely stuffing a book to bursting—with characters, with ideas, with absurdity—and yet making it all ring true.

What are your hobbies and outside interests?
I watch movies all the time: the good, the bad, the unspeakably awful (the better to mock; thank you, Mystery Science Theater 3000).    

I'm also a collector of everything from old records to antique post cards.  I've never met an antique mall I didn't like.

What is the single best piece of advice anyone ever gave you?
My father once told me to never forget that TUMS spelled backward is SMUT.  I'm not sure how to quantify the ways in which this advice ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Kate Racculia at BookBrowse
Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts jacket Bellweather Rhapsody jacket This Must Be the Place jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Kate Racculia but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Peter Bognanni

    Peter Bognanni

    Peter Bognanni is a writer currently based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His first novel, The House of Tomorrow, is out now from Amy Einhorn Books (Putnam). He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop not long ago, and his short ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    This Must Be the Place

    Try:
    The House of Tomorrow
    by Peter Bognanni

  • Peter Ho Davies

    Peter Ho Davies

    Peter Ho Davie's latest book is A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself. His previous novel, The Fortunes, a New York Times Notable Book, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and was a finalist for the Dayton ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    This Must Be the Place

    Try:
    The Fortunes
    by Peter Ho Davies

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