Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Above The Thunder

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Above The Thunder

Renée 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 MPR's "Selected Shorts" series. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Alaska.

She says, 'The kernel of this novel began with an article I read over ten years ago in a Cincinnati newspaper. A ten-year-old girl committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train, in hopes of becoming an angel and joining her mother, who had just died of AIDS. It was a story that haunted me all these years, and became the spark that got the novel underway. The novel was well underway when Jack and Stuart walked in, but it was these characters I felt I knew best.'

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This article relates to Above The Thunder. It first ran in the May 18, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.