Here’s me holding one of the new shopping bags Tom Varisco Designs produced for New Orleans’ Octavia Books. Owner Tom Lowenburg took the photo at the February 10th HarperCollins dinner at this year’s 2015 American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute. Also at the dinner were fellow HarperCollins novelists, T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville, William Morrow), Leslie Parry (Church of Marvels, Ecco) and T. C. Boyle (The Harder They Come, Ecco). In short, an exhilarating event with the nicest people in the world, namely, independent booksellers. Thanks to my imprint, Harper, for sending me.
Category Archives: News
The Power of Love
Sequence of events: (1) Tom Killingbeck who runs my British publisher’s blog site asks me to write a post about the fictional character I’d most like to date and the fictional place we’d go on said date. (2) After much serious rumination, I hit upon the perfect man, namely, Mr. Atticus Finch, Esq. (3) I write up the post and just as I’m about to send it to Tom… (4) my American publisher announces the forthcoming publication of a new Harper Lee novel about my Mr. Finch.
Coincidence? Or did my love for Atticus will him back to literary life?
OK, yeah–it’s just a coincidence. Click here to read the piece.
Indie Booksellers Cheer On Reunion
Two organizations serving independent booksellers have chosen A REUNION OF GHOSTS as their pick of the month, one for March and the other for April.
Here at home the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association has named A REUNION OF GHOSTS a Midwest Connections Pick for April 2015. MIBA member Allen Murphey nominated REUNION for this honor. He says, “I enjoyed this story from the start. I found Mitchell’s sisters and their family attractive, humorous, sympathetic, and dynamic. But then the story continued to get stronger, the events more interesting, more deeply drawn, and the more I read, the more I identified, the more I cared, the more I enjoyed.”
Meanwhile Net Galley has named REUNION one of its top ten UK books for March 2015, writing, “Complex, yet emotionally rewarding, A Reunion of Ghosts is a novel unafraid of addressing the big questions in life – love, death, guilt, family – and does so in a narrative that unfolds with true grace and skill.”
I’m so grateful for the kind words and support from independent booksellers.
They Asked, I Told
My fabulous team at 4th Estate, my UK publisher, asked me some personal questions, which are my favorite kinds of questions–so naturally I answered.
4thcoming: Judith Claire Mitchell
Name: Judith Claire Mitchell
Occupation: English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing
Book: A Reunion of Ghosts
What’s it about: Meet the Alter sisters: Lady, Vee and Delph. These three mordantly witty, complex women share their family’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They love each other fiercely, but being an Alter isn’t easy. Bad luck is in their genes, passed down through the generations. Yet no matter what life throws at these siblings, they always have a wisecrack – and each other.
In the waning days of 1999, the sisters decide it’s time to close the circle of the Alter curse. But first, as the world counts down to the dawn of a new millennium, Lady, Vee and Delph must write the final chapter of a saga generations in the making – one that is inexorably intertwined with that of the twentieth century itself. Unspooling threads of history, personal memory and family lore, they weave a mesmerising account of their lives that stretches back decades to their great-grandfather, a brilliant scientist whose professional triumph became the sinister legacy that defines them.
Why we’re excited: There’s simply no book like it. The 4th Estate team have sat around, meeting after meeting, desperately grappling for some sort of comparative title, our imprint or otherwise, but it just hasn’t happened, and we’re not sure it will. The strapline reads ‘How do three sisters write a single suicide note?’ Indeed. ‘How does one author make suicide so funny?’ we ask, feeling so sad, and so guilty at the same time.
What she’s reading: ‘The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.’
What she’s listening to: ‘I’m tempted to lie and name some super cool contemporary musician, but the truth is I tend to listen to Cole Porter and the Gershwins and classic Broadway musicals—that sort of thing. I don’t know—maybe my mother played this kind of music while I was in the womb. I also like anything Stephen Sondheim. I’ve been on a Company kick this week. Here’s to the ladies who lunch!’
What she’s watching: I don’t watch much TV, but I’ve succumbed to the 5th season of Downton Abbey and will watch the last season of Mad Men whenever it decides to return. Otherwise, it’s pretty much cat videos and clips from The Daily Show.
Favourite word: ‘In terms of its sound, I’m fond of pomplemousse, the French word for grapefruit. In terms of its meaning, I like the Yiddish word mensch.’
Favourite song: ‘“I’m Still Here.” Sondheim, from Follies. It’s sung by an older woman who was once a big star and is now coping with the anonymity that comes with aging. It’s specific to performers, but I hear it as a kind of feminist anthem. I like to belt it out when nobody’s home.’
Living person she most admires: ‘Marilynne Robinson. She was my teacher in grad school and she continues to inspire me through her novels and essays. She writes about the human capacity for goodness in a way that is profound and wise, but that also keeps the reader engaged with the plot and characters. I know my writing will never hold a candle to hers, but I do aspire to being as caring and generous a teacher to my students as she was to me.’
The trait she most deplores in herself: ‘My memory. My horrible, sieve-like memory. Do not get mugged in front of me. Unless we go to court within five minutes, I will be useless as an eye witness.’
The trait she most deplores in others: ‘Talking during movies.’
The book she wishes she’d written: ‘E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. When I first read it many, many years ago, I was struck by the blending of fictional and nonfictional characters, the beautifully-crafted yet accessible prose, the use of history to comment on the present, and the riveting plot that is at once specific to the characters and a broad examination of US culture. I think—I hope—you can see my own attempts to do similar things in A Reunion of Ghosts’
The book she thinks everyone should read: ‘Any book by Thich Nhat Hanh.’
The book she’d like republished: ‘I was about to say During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, Joan Chase’s 1983 debut about cousins growing up in Ohio, but when I looked it up I saw that The New York Review of Books has recently republished it. So now I don’t have an answer to this question. Thanks a lot, New York Review of Books.’
Writing ritual: ‘Is avoidance a ritual?’
Best advice ever received: ‘Best writing advice was from another teacher, Frank Conroy: “The project is nothing; the process is everything.” Best living advice was from Claire Mitchell, my mom: “Life is so full of sorrow and suffering that when the chance for happiness comes along, you should grab it with both fists.”’
A Reunion of Ghosts is published by 4th Estate on 12th March 2015
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Publishers Weekly Starred Review
So happy and grateful for another starred review for REUNION, this time from Publishers Weekly:
A Reunion of Ghosts
Judith Claire Mitchell Harper $26.99 (400p)
Mitchell’s triumphant second novel (The Last Day of the War) explores love, identity, and the burdens of history in coruscating, darkly comic prose. As the 20th century closes, Lady, Delph, and Vee Alter decide to kill themselves. The decision is not surprising; the middle-aged sisters embrace the chart of previous family suicides that hangs in their New York apartment as a source of “reassuring inevitability.” Departing from Alter tradition, however, they decide to leave a suicide note, intertwining their own narratives into their family’s complex history. At the heart of it is German Jew turned Lutheran Lenz Alter, who invented the chemical process that created the chlorine gas used in WWI and a predecessor to Zyklon B, used in Nazi death camps. His culpability seemed to poison the generations, as Lenz; his wife, Iris; their son, Richard; and Richard’s three daughters (one of whom is the mother of Lady, Delph, and Vee) all died by their own hands. Or so the sisters think, until a surprising visitation suggests that the family curse is not as defining as it seems. Moving nimbly through time and balancing her weightier themes with the sharply funny, fiercely unsentimental perspectives of her three protagonists—each distinct, yet also, as their name suggests, at “different stages of a single life”—Mitchell’s fictional suicide note is poignant and pulsing with life force. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment. (Mar.)
Reviewed on 01/16/2015 |
Wonderfully Bazaar
From a round-up of “the best books to read in 2015” in the UK edition of Harper’s Bazaar comes this lovely bit of praise from novelist, editor, and book critic Sam Baker:
“…my favourite novel of the year so far is Judith Claire Mitchell’s A Reunion of Ghosts. Set as the millennium approaches, this mordantly funny story of the Alter sisters – Lady, Vee and Delph – is a literary mash-up of The Virgin Suicides and Grey Gardens. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are slugging it out for the film rights already.”
An exciting fantasy, to be sure. I’m already imagining the casting: Jason Schwartzman and Owen and Luke Wilson as the Alter Sisters, Bill Murray as Albert Einstein…
Buzzed
Can you find my little ol’ novel in the above picture? Hint: it’s next to books by TC Boyle and Laura Van Den Berg and above books by Kazuo Ishiguro and Kelly Link. Also on this list are new books by Toni Morrison and Jonathan Franzen. In short: I’m humbled and you’d better believe I’m also bragging.
What’s more, if you go to the listicle at Buzzfeed, you’ll see they’ve also included my colleague and pal Amy Quan Barry’s SHE WEEPS EACH TIME YOU’RE BORN. In short, 40% of the professors teaching in the University of Wisconsin’s MFA program are on this list. And this time I’m 100% bragging, nothing humble about it. Go Badgers!
Starred Review from Kirkus
A REUNION OF GHOSTS ‘s first review will appear in the January 15th issue of Kirkus, the venerable journal that reviews over 7,000 new books annually prior to their publication. It will also be online as of January 8. For those who can’t wait (Hi, Mom), here’s the sneak preview that my wonderful editor sent me today. It’s a coveted star review and I’m so grateful for the publication’s incredible kindness and generosity:
A REUNION OF GHOSTSAuthor: Judith Claire Mitchell
Three middle-aged sisters collaborating on a memoir that’s meant to double as their collective suicide note may not sound like a hilarious premise for a novel, but Mitchell’s masterful family saga is as funny as it is aching. Together, Lady, Vee and Delph Alter have decided that New Year’s Eve, 1999—the cusp of the new millennium—will be the day they end their lives, quietly and with as little melodrama as possible. But first, they have embarked upon writing this “whatever-it-is—this memoir, this family history, this quasi-confessional.” It will record the saga of the last four generations of Alters (theirs included). Also, it will double as their joint suicide note. (“Q: How do three sisters write a single suicide note? A: The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.”) Suicide seems to run in the Alter family, and now it has reached the current generation: Vee, the middle sister—whose beloved husband was murdered getting lunch one day at Chock full o’Nuts—has cancer, with six months to a year left. If one sister goes, they’re all going. And so begins their project, which traces the Alter family history, starting with their maternal great-grandmother, brilliant and stifled, and great-grandfather, the German-Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist who invented the gas that would ultimately be used in the Nazi death chambers. “He was the sinner who doomed us all,” they write, the root of the ill-fated family tree. She died (a gun in the garden); he followed suit (morphine). With variations, the subsequent generations did the same. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, from Germany to the Upper West Side, Mitchell’s (The Last Day of the War, 2004) dark comedy captures the agony and ecstasy (but mostly agony) with deep empathy and profound wit. For the Alters, life has been a seemingly endless series of tragedies; for us, the tragedy is that this stunning novel inevitably comes to an end.
Review Issue Date: January 15, 2015
Online Publish Date: January 8, 2015
Publisher:Harper/HarperCollins
Publication Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-06-235588-1
Category: Fiction
Unutterably Bleak…But Not!
Very happy that Alice O’Keefe, editor of the British publication The Bookseller, has named A REUNION OF GHOSTS one of her featured choices for March 2015. Her review describes the book as “the extraordinary tale of the three Alter sisters who are living together in a New York apartment at the tail end of the last century, and who have collectively decided to kill themselves. The novel is essentially a long suicide note…This may sound unutterably bleak, but the novel is not, and it’s laced with pitch-black humour.”
Unutterably bleak, but not. YES!! Exactly what I was going for.
Advanced Reader Editions
I love how the clouds on the blue U.S. and yellow U.K. editions speak to each other