Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Melissa Bank Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Melissa Bank

Melissa Bank

Melissa Bank Biography

Melissa Bank was an American author. She attended Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and had an MFA from Cornell University. Her works include The Girls' Guide to Hunting, Fishing, a volume of short stories: The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine, and The Wonder Spot.

Bank was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction.

She died August 2, 2022, in East Hampton, New York, after a struggle with lung cancer.



This bio was last updated on 08/05/2022. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Interview

Join us in a brief conversation with Melissa Bank as she discusses The Girls’ Guide as it relates to “single-women titles” and whether a writer’s gender is relevant to a work of modern fiction.

Q. The women in The Girls' Guide have a hard time resisting stereotypically feminine behavior. Is it harder for women to resist girlie clichés than for men to resist macho ones? How does the battle differ?

A. Everybody has had a Jamie boyfriend, the rudderless young guy, the free spirit. How do you explain the incredible consistency of the contemporary romantic experience?

Q. Prefacing your interview in Salon, Cynthia Joyce made reference to "a slew of other recently published single-women titles." Is this a new genre? What's the literary legacy behind it? How would you say writers like Jane Austen or Sylvia Plath relate to this new work from women writers? How would you characterize this new wave of female voices?

A. How is a writer's gender relevant to a work of modern fiction? We've had women's magazines for a long time, but now there are women's Web sites and women's cable channels, among other girl-centric media. What are your views about this trend? Is there such a thing as a women's movie or book?

Q. Do you feel that The Girls' Guide is a feminist book? Why or why not?

A. Nature is mostly absent from Jane's world. She loves dogs and the beach, but ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Books by this Author

Books by Melissa Bank at BookBrowse
The Wonder Spot jacket The Girl's Guide To Hunting & Fishing jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Melissa Bank but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

We recommend 6 similar authors

View all 6 Read-Alikes

Non-members can see 2 results. Become a member
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...
  • Book Jacket
    The Rest of You
    by Maame Blue
    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...
  • Book Jacket: The Book of George
    The Book of George
    by Kate Greathead
    The premise of The Book of George, the witty, highly entertaining new novel from Kate Greathead, is ...
  • Book Jacket: The Sequel
    The Sequel
    by Jean Hanff Korelitz
    In Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Sequel, Anna Williams-Bonner, the wife of recently deceased author ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

There is no worse robber than a bad book.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

X M T S

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.