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Suzanne McConnell - If You Think Your Heart Can Take It and Other Stories
Past event
Featured Book
If You Think Your Heart Can Take It: And Other Stories
"Exquisite stories of love and lust and the drive, above all, to connect. Suzanne McConnell is a master of precision. Her prose shines on the page, carrying the reader effortlessly into her characters’ worlds. A luminous collection that gloriously pushes the boundaries of the form.”
––Joan Leegant, author of Displaced Persons, winner of the New American Press Fiction Prize
These stories trace lives caught in transition and choice. Attentive to the forces that shape us–desire, regret, loyalty, hope– Suzanne McConnell pulls readers into moments of tension that make it impossible to turn away.
––Danielle Ofri, editor of Bellevue Literary Review, author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
“Suzanne McConnell writes about human entanglements with an unsparing eye and the way they actually happen—messily––and with a truth you feel in your gut. Her gaze is fearless. Her writing is brilliant.”
––Dan Pope, author of Housebreaking
“The variety in Suzanne McConnell’s stories is stunning. However colorful or exotic the setting, McConnell brings us to the abyss–of insanity, of unspeakable loss, or of an actual cliff over the Pacific Ocean. McConnell walks us along a tightrope, but she is effortlessly sure-footed–and seriously entertaining.”
—Meredith Sue Willis, Author of Oradell at Sea and In the Mountains of America
When it comes to the daily assault of slings and arrows, Suzanne McConnell doesn’t miss a thing. As one—a painter—puts it: “I paint fog. I am not interested in fog per se. What interests me is shape, shade, the distinct line between things and the lack of it.” Don’t miss reading these stories. Each is an alchemist’s stone transforming the ordinariness of everyday life into literary truth and artistry.
—Pamela Ryder, Author of Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him: The Lives of Billy the Kid
Suzanne McConnell’s award-winningstories have appeared in many literary magazines and twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she received her MFA, and has published profiles of him, lectured on his work, and her book on his advice on writing, Pity the Reader: on Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell, has been translated into five languages. She taught writing at Hunter College for thirty years and served as a Fiction Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review for twenty. She lives in Manhattan and Wellfleet, MA, with her husband Gary Kuehn, a visual artist. www.suzannemcconnell.com
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Suzanne McConnell will read from her new story collection, If You Think Your Heart Can Take It and Other Stories. Pamela Ryder, Author of Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him: The Lives of Billy the Kid, praises If You Think Your Heart Can Take It by saying: "Don’t miss reading these stories. Each is an alchemist’s stone transforming the ordinariness of everyday life into literary truth and artistry." Meanwhile, Joan Leegant, author of Displaced Persons, winner of the New American Press Fiction Prize, says: "McConnell is a master of precision. Her prose shines on the page. This collection gloriously pushes the boundaries of the form."Suzanne McConnell is the author of Pity The Reader: On Writing with Style, by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her stories, essays, and poems have appeared and won prizes in many publications. She has been granted residencies at Ucross Foundation, the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. She taught writing and literature at Hunter College for thirty years and was the Fiction Editor at Bellevue Literary Review for 20 years. McConnell holds an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in Sociology from the University of Arkansas, where she started writing. She grew up in San Diego and lives in New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts with her husband, visual artist Gary Kuehn.
Featured Author
McConnell, Susan
Suzanne McConnell's award-winning stories have appeared in many literary magazines and twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer's Workshop where she received her MFA, and has published profiles of him, lectured on his work, and her book on his advice on writing, Pity the Reader: on Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell, has been translated into five languages. She taught writing at Hunter College for thirty years and served as a Fiction Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review for twenty. She lives in Manhattan and Wellfleet, MA, with her husband Gary Kuehn, a visual artist. www.suzannemcconnell.com
About the Venue
Prairie Lights Books
Prairie Lights sprang to life in May 1978 as a small, intimate bookstore offering titles by the newer voices of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro and by established authors like Eudora Welty and George Orwell. As the staff and customers tended the books with care much like a garden, the store grew and blossomed. By 1982 Prairie Lights transplanted itself from South Linn St. to South Dubuque and has gradually spread to three and a half floors, the half being an 1100 square foot coffee house located in the same space that the local literary society met throughout the 1930's, hosting writers Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Sherwood Anderson, Langston Hughes, E.E Cummings and others. Gertrude Stein and friend Alice B. Toklas were scheduled for a reading but were sleeted in at Waukesha airport-- or so the story goes. Perhaps the strength of reputation lies in the reading series of local, national and international writers who have read their works which were broadcast live on stations WSUI and WOI and which was the only regular literary series of its kind. All of this could not have been possible without a loyal customer base and a dedicated staff. We thank our customers for their continued support, and welcome our new customers.
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