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Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books, including the novels In the Image (Norton 2002), The World to Come (Norton 2006), All Other Nights (Norton 2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013), and Eternal Life (Norton 2018), and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Norton 2021). One of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists (2007), she is the recipient of two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and she was a finalist for the Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist's 25 Best Books of the Decade, and San Francisco Chronicle's Best Books of the Year, and have been translated into eleven languages. Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications, and she is a regular columnist for Tablet Magazine.
Horn received her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University, studying Yiddish and Hebrew. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University, and held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard. She has lectured for audiences in hundreds of venues throughout North America, Israel, and Australia. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
Dara Horn's website
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Two separate interviews in which Dara Horn discusses All Other Nights and The World To Come.
An Interview with Dara Horn in which she suggests that historical novels are more about the time in which they are written than the time in which they take place. The Q&A ends with detailed examples of the ciphers used by both the North and South during the Civil War.
What attracted you to the idea of setting a book in the Civil War?
I think that every historical novel is really much more about the time in which
it is written than the time in which it takes place, and that is very true for
this book. The Civil War attracted me because of how polarized America has
become in the past decade, and because of how impossible it has become even to
have a conversation about current events without knowing in advance what the
other person believes. The divide between conservatives and liberals, or "red
states" and "blue states," really does go back to the Civil War in so many ways;
the "red states" and "blue states" tend to follow the Mason-Dixon line and its
legacies.
In 2002, after my first novel was published, I was invited to speak in New
Orleans , and while I was there, I ...
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