Robin Clarke runs from an abusive family to a teaching job in South Bend, Indiana, and the novel is about what she does with the distance. Leila Renee published it Tuesday through HarperCollins. Syracuse MFA, a Fulbright, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, short stories in McSweeney's and the Kenyon Review; Deesha Philyaw blurbed it. Renee began drafting in 2020 while reading Edward P. Jones's The Known World, and names Burger's Daughter for structure, Sula and My Brilliant Friend for the friendship, Luster for a protagonist who keeps walking into her own way. On the nightstand right now: Henry Dumas, the Arkansas writer shot by a New York transit officer in 1968 at thirty-three, whose stories she is reading specifically to keep the name moving. That is the reading list of somebody who intends to write more than one book.
THE MUSA FAMILY · HEIRWAVE
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