Fiction: Maxine Swann, Aoibheann Sweeney & Jennifer Belle

Maxine Swann was born in 1969 in York, Pennsylvania.  Her critically acclaimed first novel, Serious Girls (Picador, 2003), was selected for the Booksense 76 List, and was published internationally in Dutch and Spanish.  Her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares and Open City, and on nerve.com.  Her literary prizes include the Ploughshares’ Cohen Award, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize.  In March 2008, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Swann the 2008 Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award to honor the exceptional quality of her prose style.  She has been an artist in residence at Yaddo and the Edward Albee Foundation.  Swann is a graduate of Phillips Academy Andover and Columbia College, and has also received a master’s degree in French literature from the Sorbonne.  Aside from her work in fiction, she is a translator, screenwriter, and teacher who lives in Buenos Aires and New York City.   Maxine Swann reads from her novel: Flower Children

“Writing in lucid, crystalline prose…[Swann] captures the incongruities of the 1970s counterculture as seen from the point of view of a young child, the shifting attitudes the narrator and her three siblings take toward the adult world as they slip-slide from childhood into adolescence, and the incalculable ways in which the passage of time colorizes the past.”
—The New York Times
 

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Aoibheann Sweeney earned her BA at Harvard where she won the John Harvard Scholarship and Elizabeth Carey Agassiz Award, and her MFA at the University of Virginia, where whe was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She has written book reviews for The New York Times Book Reveiw, the Washington Post Book World, and the Village Voice. She is curently the director of the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, She reads from her novel: Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

"Part sexual awakening, part family mystery it is an animated by the hungry perceptions of a young woman struggling to find her place. Remarkable for its poise and restraint, ths first novel unleashes a sharp and wholly original new voice," Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Belle reads from her novel: Little Stalker

Jennifer Belle burst onto the literary scene in 1996 with her critically-acclaimed debut novel Going Down. Belle was named Best New Novelist by Entertainment Weekly, profiled in New York and People magazines, and compared to Dorothy Parker, Lorrie Moore, and J.D. Salinger. Her second equally-praised novel, the national bestseller High Maintenance, took on the cutthroat world of Manhattan real estate. Belle’s third novel, LITTLE STALKER

"Jennifer Belle is a real New York original…She’s got a keen eye, an acute sense of comic timing and, I would surmise, a heart tattooed just under her sleeve.” —Jay McInerney