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Highly regarded as both a novelist and a short story writer, Ethan Canin has ranged in his career from the short stories of Emperor of the Air to the novellas of The Palace Thief, from the short novel Carry Me Across the Water to the America America. His short stories, which have been the basis for four Hollywood movies, have appeared in a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, and Granta, and have been selected for many prize anthologies.
The son of a musician and a public-school art teacher, he spent his childhood in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and California before attending Stanford University, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and then Harvard Medical School. He subsequently gave up a career in medicine to write and teach, and is now F. Wendell Miller Professor of English at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he has been privileged to teach a great number of talented new writers. In his spare time he is very slowly remodeling two old houses, one in the woods of northern Michigan and the other in Iowa City, where he lives with his wife, their three children, and four chickens.
Ethan Canin's website
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Random House Reader's Circle: America America is an
ambitious novel that embraces the great themes of politics, power, family,
class, integrity and love; even the title suggests we are in for a
monumental read. How did this novel begin for you personally, and what does
it represent for you as a move in your own life as a writer?
Ethan Canin: America America began for me as a smaller
idea. Originally, it was only the story of Corey Sifter, a
working-class boy, who falls in love with Christian Metarey, an
aristocratic girl. I'd written about 250 pages of that novel when the
attacks occurred on September 11, 2001; and that morning, as it turned out,
was the last time I wrote fiction for close to two years. I put the novel
aside and didn't pick it up again until 2003. And when I began writing again
I found myself much more urgently involved with history and politics and the
nature of power. A senator made his way into the story, then a presidential
campaign. The novel's evolution began to reflect my own, and that of many
others who on that day became more serious about the world.
RHRC: Many ...
Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Rochester, Wisconsin. She is the author of five novels. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel and was a ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
America America
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Adam Haslett is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Union Atlantic and Imagine Me Gone. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as a finalist for the National ... (more)
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A Doubter's Almanac
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