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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Kayla Rae Whitaker is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and New York University. Her first novel, The Animators, was named a best book of the year by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage. She lives in Queens, New York.
Kayla Rae Whitaker's website
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Describe The Animators to us.
The Animators is about Sharon Kisses and her business partner and friend, Mel Vaught, two brilliant cartoonists who meet in college and begin working together. Despite their differences – Mel is a wildly charismatic, drug-dabbling, party-starter, Sharon, a shy, wry, lovelorn misanthrope - the Vaught and Kisses partnership is a profoundly productive and creative one (their style: think a more feminist Fritz the Cat, with an Adult Swim sensibility) ... until the breakout success of their first full-length animated film. The publicity tour sends Mel and Sharon on a road trip back to their childhood homes in rural Florida and Kentucky, setting off a year that is the most difficult of their collective lives: as Mel's substance abuse reaches combustion levels, Sharon suffers a medical crisis, leaving Mel, who barely knows how to pay a bill, to care for both their business and Sharon. Can Vaught and Kisses survive in the face of an uncertain future?
The Animators asks what happens when, after years of striving, ambition finally starts to pay off. It's about being a woman artist. It's about friendship, partnership, and how the baggage we carry with us contours those relationships.
In the ...
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is also the creator... (more)
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Madeline Cash is the coeditor of Forever Magazine and the author of the story collection Earth Angel. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Baffler, The Sewanee Review, The Drift, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City. (more)
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