Elizabeth Strout
publisher
Random House
format
Paperback
pages
288
Frank Delaney
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Margot Livesey
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Ayad Akhtar
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Jack Finney
What I’ve recognized for so long has just been validated: Elizabeth Strout was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and now everyone can read OLIVE KITTERIDGE and be entranced!
Strout’s earlier novels, AMY & ISABELLE (’98) and ABIDE WITH ME (’06) were critically acclaimed, but OLIVE KITTERIDGE the book and Olive, the character, are in a class by themselves. This book is a collection of stories; in some, Olive features prominently and in others, she’s mentioned. There is an honest recognition here that we need to try to understand people, even if we can’t stand them.
What Strout achieves so successfully is that she excavates stories from the houses we see from the road, and then she passes them along in language we understand with the heart. Olive is all rough edges; she says what she thinks and doesn’t mince words. Her language is a shield, buffering her from others’ weaknesses and meannesses. Strout’s writing animates the ordinary with astonishing details; her stories are all set in Maine and explore family dynamics, small-town hypocrisy and gossip, and grief.
Dive in—you won’t surface til you’ve finished the book.
About the AuthorElizabeth Strout is the author of Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and lives in New York City.
Beyond the book