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How to pronounce Abraham Verghese: vur-gees with a hard 'g'
Abraham Verghese is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of the NBCC Award finalist My Own Country and the New York Times Notable Book The Tennis Partner. His most recent book, Cutting for Stone, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than two million copies worldwide. It was translated into more than twenty languages and is being adapted for film by Anonymous Content. Verghese was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, has received six honorary degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives and practices medicine in Stanford, California where he is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. A decade in the making, The Covenant of Water is his first book since Cutting for Stone.
Abraham Verghese's website
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An interview with Abraham Verghese about his life and writing and in particular about his 2009 novel Cutting for Stone
Your previous two books are non-fiction, but you've said that you have always thought of
yourself as a fiction writer first. How so?
Fiction is truly my first love. To paraphrase Dorothy Allison, fiction is the great lie that tells the
truth about how the world really lives. It is why in teaching medical students I use Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych to teach about end-of-life, and Bastard out of Carolina to help students really understand child abuse. A textbook rarely gives them the kind of truth or understanding achieved in
the best fiction.
One of my first published short stories was "Lilacs," in which the protagonist has HIV. Its
appearance in The New Yorker in 1991 was a part of what led to my contract to write My Own Country,
a memoir of my years of caring for persons with HIV in rural Tennessee. While writing that book
I found myself living through an intense personal story of friendship and loss that led to a second
non-fiction book, The Tennis Partner. But after that, I passed up on an offer to write a third non-fiction
book. I was keen to get back to fiction...
Author of three New York Times best-sellers and three collections of short stories, a children's book (another coming in 2022) and a ground-breaking collection of essays. Bloom has been a nominee for both the National Book ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Cutting For Stone
Try:
Away
by Amy Bloom
John Colman Wood teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His field research with Gabra nomads of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geographic ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Cutting For Stone
Try:
The Names of Things
by John Colman Wood
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