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The people who orbit around Renn Ivins, an actor of Harrison Ford-like stature - his girlfriends, his children, his ex-wives, those on the periphery - long to experience the glow of his fame. Anna and Will are Renn's grown children, struggling to be authentic versions of themselves in a world where they are seen as less important extensions of their father. They are both drawn to and repelled by the man who overshadows every part of them.
Most of us can imagine the perks of celebrity, but Little Known Facts offers a clear-eyed story of its effects - the fallout of fame and fortune on family members and others who can neither fully embrace nor ignore the superstar in their midst. With Little Known Facts, Christine Sneed emerges as one of the most insightful chroniclers of our celebrity-obsessed age, telling a story of influence and affluence, of forging identity and happiness and a moral compass; the question being, if we could have anything on earth, would we choose correctly?
"Starred Review. An ensnaring first novel that delves into the complex challenges and anguish of living with and in the shadow of celebrity." - Booklist
"Unimaginative..While real-life fans may zealously follow the ups and downs of their idols' lives, [Sneed ] takes for granted that readers will feel the same fascination for her fictional superstar and his private struggles. " - Publishers Weekly
"I grabbed Christine Sneed's novel Little Known Facts on my way out the door this weekend and ate it up. It's a great canny read: wry, observant, inventive in style, rich in character. Christine Sneed knows her Hollywood, but more than that, she knows her people." - Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins and National Book Award finalist for The Zero
"The gravitational pull of fame in a celebrity-obsessed culture informs this smart, fresh debut about a family living in the shadow cast by its larger-than-life patriarch." - Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award finalist for American Salvage
This information about Little Known Facts was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christine Sneed has a creative writing MFA from Indiana University and has lived in Chicago and Evanston, IL since 1998. She teaches creative writing at DePaul University, Northwestern University and Pacific University. Her story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, won AWP's 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, first-fiction category, was named the Chicago Writer's Association Book of the Year, and has been chosen as the recipient of Ploughshares' 2011 first-book prize, the John C. Zacharis Award. It was also long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and named one of the seven best books of the year by Time Out Chicago.
Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Notre Dame Review, and a number of other journals. Visit her web site at http://www.christinesneed.com.
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