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How to pronounce Rachel Barenbaum: BARE-enn-bowm
Rachel is a prolific writer and reviewer and her work has appeared in the LA Review of Books, the Tel Aviv Review of Books and DeadDarlings. She is an Honorary Research Associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University and a graduate of GrubStreet's Novel Incubator. She is also the founder of Debut Spotlight and the Debut Editor at A Mighty Blaze.
Rachel Barenbaum's debut, A Bend in the Stars was named a New York Times Summer Reading Selection and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. It was also a Boston Globe Bestseller. Her second novel is Atomic Anna
In a former life she was a hedge fund manager and a spin instructor. She has degrees from Harvard in Business and Literature and Philosophy. She lives in Brookline, MA.
Rachel Barenbaum's website
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What inspired you to write Atomic Anna?
I have always been obsessed with the question: Does intention matter? And I remember thinking about this when I first learned about the Chernobyl disaster, the day I watched the news and began to understand the enormity of the catastrophe. Nuclear power was intended for good, but in Chernobyl's case it ended up killing and destroying the lives of countless people and animals. I remember asking myself, if it was meant for good but ends up killing, is it actually good?
Similarly, I remember teachers introducing the idea of mutually assured destruction in history class and suggesting the arms race was in our best interest. But was it really? Is it really?
When I sat down to write Atomic Anna, I wanted my characters to ask themselves that same question. And I wanted to base it on some reality—but I love writing books with women at the center, so I imagined Chernobyl was run by a woman and came up with Anna first. In my head, she was obsessed with this central question of intention. As I started to write, the story came to life and shifted because Anna's intentions changed over time as she grew and changed. Even more, I realized Anna didn't exist alone. I found myself writing about ...
Alina Adams was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and immigrated with her parents to the U.S. in 1977 at age seven, where she learned English by watching American soap operas at their home in San Francisco.
Alina is a fiction ...
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If you enjoyed:
Atomic Anna
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Louisa Hall grew up in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Speak and The Carriage House, and her poems have been published in The New Republic, Southwest Review, and other journals. She is a professor at the ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Atomic Anna
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Trinity
by Louisa Hall
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