Standalone Novels In Publication Order
- And Now You Can Go (2003)
- Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2007)
- The Lovers (2010)
- The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty (2015)
- We Run the Tides (2021)
Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order
- Girls on the Verge: Debutante Dips, Drive-Bys, and Other Initiations (1999)
- Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews (With: Ross Simonini) (2014)
- Let’s Break Some Black Hearts: A Decade of Film Interviews from The Believer (With: Ross Simonini) (2015)
Believer Books of Writers Talking to Writers Books In Publication Order
- The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (With: ) (2005)
- Always Apprentices: The Believer Book of Even More Writers Talking to Writers (With: ,Ross Simonini) (2013)
Read Hard Books In Publication Order
- Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from the Believer (With: ) (2009)
Anthologies In Publication Order
- Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from the Believer (2009)
- The Writer’s Library (2020)
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Non-Fiction Book Covers
Believer Books of Writers Talking to Writers Book Covers
Read Hard Book Covers
Anthologies Book Covers
Vendela Vida Books Overview
And Now You Can Go
A sharply humorous, fast paced debut novel about the effects some predictable, some wildly unexpected that an encounter at gunpoint can have on the life of a previously assured young woman. The gun in question is pointed at twenty one year old Ellis as she walks through a New York City park. In the end she is unrobbed and physically unharmed. But she is left psychologically reeling. Over the next few weeks Ellis keeps everyone at bay: the police, the men who want to save her the ROTC boy poet and the red faced representative of the world , and the university therapist who hints that her sweaters may be too tight. But when Ellis accompanies her mother, a nurse, on a mission to the Philippines, she finds that life even if held up cannot be held back, and neither, finally, can she.
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name
On the day of her father’s funeral, twenty eight year old Clarissa Iverton discovers that he wasn’t her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, and now Clarissa is alone and adrift. The one person she feels she can trust, her fianc , Pankaj, has just revealed a terrible and life changing secret to her. In the cycle of a day, all the truths in Clarissa’s world become myths and rumors, and she is catapulted out of the life she knew. She finds her birth certificate, which leads her from New York to Helsinki, and then north of the Arctic Circle, to mystical Lapland, where she believes she’ll meet her real father. There, under the northern lights of a sunless winter, Clarissa comes to know the Sami, the indigenous population, and seeks out a local priest, the one man who may hold the key to her origins. Along her travels she meets an elderly Sami healer named Anna Kristine, who has her own secrets, and a handsome young reindeer herder named Henrik, who accompanies Clarissa to a hotel made of ice. There she is confronted with the truth about her mother’s past and finally must make a decision about how and where to live the rest of her life. Joan Didion said of Vendela Vida’s last book: ‘And Now You Can Go is so fast, so mesmerizing to read, and so accomplished that it’s hard to think of it as a first novel, which it is. Vendela Vida has promise to spare.’ With Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, Vida more than lives up to that promise as she gives us a remarkable protagonist who is both fierce and funny, and an unforgettable literary thriller that questions whether we can ever truly know where we’ve come from and if it is possible to escape our pasts.
The Lovers
From the acclaimed author of the 2007 New York Times Notable Book Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name comes a stunning novel about the love between husbands and wives, mothers and children. Twenty eight years ago, Peter and Yvonne honeymooned in the beautiful coastal village of Dat a, Turkey. Now Yvonne is a widow, her twin children grown. Hoping to immerse herself in memories of a happier time as well as sand and sea Yvonne returns to Dat a. But her plans for a restorative week in Turkey are quickly complicated. Instead of comforting her, her memories begin to trouble her. Her vacation rental’s landlord and his bold, intriguing wife who share a curious marital arrangement become constant uninvited visitors, in and out of the house. Overwhelmed by the past and unexpectedly dislocated by the environment, Yvonne clings to a newfound friendship with Ahmet, a local boy who makes his living as a shell collector. With Ahmet as her guide, Yvonne gains new insight into the lives of her own adult children, and she finally begins to enjoy the shimmering sea and relaxed pace of the Turkish coast. But a devastating accident upends her delicate peace and throws her life into chaos and her sense of self into turmoil. With the crystalline voice and psychological nuance for which her work has been so celebrated, Vendela Vida has crafted another unforgettable hero*ine in a stunningly beautiful and mysterious landscape.
Girls on the Verge: Debutante Dips, Drive-Bys, and Other Initiations
In a fascinating look at how young women are coming of age in America, Vendela Vida explores a variety of rituals that girls have adapted or created in order to leave their childhoods behind. Vida doesn’t just observe the rituals, she actively participates in them, going as far as spending a week at UCLA to experience rush she emerges a Tri Delt. She also goes to Miami to learn about the ‘quince’ the Latin American celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday, to Houston to take part in a debutante ball, to Los Angeles and San Francisco to talk to female gang members, to Salem, Massachusetts, to interview a coven of witches, and to Las Vegas to watch young brides take the plunge some of them in drive through wedding chapels. With humor, insight, and illuminating detail, she explores girls’ struggles to forge an identity and secure a sense of belonging through various rituals rituals that they embrace without necessarily understanding the comforts they seek or the repercussions of their often all too adult choices.
The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (With: )
Believer Books has collected, in alphabetical order, twenty three conversations and correspondences between much admired writers and the writers they admire. The interviews include favorites gleaned from the pages of the Believer magazine along with previously unpublished conversations. The book is rife with astonishing insights and profound quips. To wit: George Saunders: ‘I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really, viscerally, believe that everything matters, suffering is real, and death is imminent.’ Ian McEwan: ‘The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer.’ Jamaica Kincaid: ‘All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself though, thank god I had never committed them to paper I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn’t hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don’t believe in that at all anymore.’ Janet Malcolm: ‘The narrator of my nonfiction pieces is not the same person I am she is a lot more articulate and thinks of much cleverer things to say than I usually do.’
Paul Auster: ‘In my own case, I certainly don’t walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door. I don’t burst into the saloon with my six shooter ready. If I did, I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.’ Tobias Wolff: ‘Each time out should be a swing for the fences. Don’t do base running drills. You can do those on your own time.’
Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from the Believer (With: )
This volume collects the finest essays and articles from the four time National Magazine Award nominated Believer magazine. The book combines all the erudition and wit readers have come to expect from its pages: Jonathan Lethem on Nathanael West, William T. Vollmann on W. G. Sebald, Ben Ehrenreich on Brian Evenson, Paul La Farge on Dungeons & Dragons, and much, much more. It’s an essential anthology, collecting the best in creative nonfiction, the best in literary journalism, and the best writing in English from the beginning of the twenty first century, from one of the smartest, weirdest, and funniest magazines in the country.
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