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is the author of seven novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician's Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, State of Wonder, and Commonwealth. She was the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006, and has written three books of nonfiction–Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, What Now? an expansion of her graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays examining the theme of commitment, and These Precious Days, essays on home, family, friendship, and writing. In 2019, she published her first children's book, Lambslide, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser.
A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Patchett has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including England's Orange Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Book Sense Book of the Year, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize, The Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the American Bookseller's Association's Most Engaging Author Award, and the Women's National Book Association's Award. Her books have been both New York Times Notable Books and New York Times bestsellers. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
In November, 2011, she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with her business partner Karen Hayes. She has since become a spokesperson for independent booksellers, championing books and bookstores on NPR, The Colbert Report (including the series finale), Oprah's Super Soul Sunday, The Martha Stewart Show, and The CBS Early Show, among many others. Along with James Patterson, she was the honorary chair of World Book Night. In 2012 she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
Ann Patchett lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender, and their dog, Sparky. Click here to subscribe to her blog, Notes from Ann, featuring book recommendations, exclusive commentary, articles, and more. Follow along with Parnassus Books on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the bookstore blog, Musing.
Ann Patchett's website
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What inspired you to write this novel?
Usually it's hard to pin down the exact point at which you come up
with an idea for a novel but this one is easy: December 17th, 1996, the night
that the terrorist organization Tupac Amaru took over the Japanese embassy in
Lima, Peru. I'm sure I didn't know that day that this story would turn into Bel
Canto, but I was completely focused on it from the start. It had so many
elements that were compelling to me: confinement, survival, the construction of
family. For a long time I'd wanted to find a way to experience the things I
read about in the paper, to grieve for disasters that had no immediate affect on
my life. Turning a tragedy I knew nothing about into this novel was part of that
process.
Were you an opera aficionado prior to writing Bel Canto?
I wasn't. I knew as much about opera as I did about baseball, which
is to say nothing. But once I came up with the character of Roxane Coss I threw
myself into learning about it whole-heartedly. The best thing I did was to buy a
book called Opera 101 by Fred Plotkin. It tells you how to listen and
what to listen to. It takes you through everything you need to know step by
step. It was my bible. Then I listened ...
Chloe is a writer from San Francisco, CA. She is the author of The Immortalists, a New York Times bestseller, and The Anatomy of Dreams, which received the 2014 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award. Chloe is a graduate of Vassar ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Commonwealth
Try:
The Immortalists
by Chloe Benjamin
Author of three New York Times best-sellers and three collections of short stories, a children's book (another coming in 2022) and a ground-breaking collection of essays. Bloom has been a nominee for both the National Book ... (more)
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