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How to pronounce Olga Grushin: GREW-shin
Olga Grushin is a Russian-born award-winning writer whose work has been translated into fifteen languages. Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and for England's Orange Award for New Writers. The New York Times chose it as a Notable Book of the Year, and both it and her second novel, The Line, were among The Washington Post's Ten Best Books of the Year (2007, 2010). In 2007, Granta named Grushin one of the Best Young American Novelists. Forty Rooms is her third novel. Grushin was born in Moscow, moved to the United States as a teenager, and now lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children.
Olga Grushin's website
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What is your novel, Forty Rooms, about?
My novel is about many things – art, inspiration, motherhood, living spaces that contain and define us – but at its heart, it's a book about choices. It tells a story of one woman who struggles to choose between following a path that is ordinary but may lead to happiness or a path that is uncommon and will lead into the unknown. The story is told in forty chronological episodes, each set in a different room of her life, from the cramped bathroom of her childhood apartment in Russia to the stately entrance hall of her last home in America. And every episode – every room – contains a choice she must make. Some choices are momentous – whether to go abroad or remain at home, whether to leave a lover or stay with him, whether to get married, whether to have a child; she knows as she makes them that they will alter the direction of her life. Others seem small, and their implications become apparent only years later, when she can barely recall how and when it was that everything changed, and she wonders if it would have been different if only she'd paid more attention. Over time, my character undergoes a deep internal transformation from the nameless dreamy, hungry ...
Nickolas Butler was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is the author of the ... (more)
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Forty Rooms
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Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The ... (more)
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