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Amy Bloom Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

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

Amy Bloom
Photo: © Elena Seibert

Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom Biography

Author of three New York Times best-sellers and three collections of short stories, a children's book (another coming in 2022) and a ground-breaking collection of essays. Bloom has been a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, O Magazine and Vogue, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award for Fiction. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She has written many pilot scripts, for cable and network, and she created, wrote and ran the excellent, short-lived series State of Mind, starring Lili Taylor. She is now Wesleyan University's Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing.

Amy Bloom's website

This bio was last updated on 02/26/2022. 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.

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Interview

Amy Bloom explains how a long night of dictation to a former student, plus a bottle of wine, led to the creation of Away, an epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent and accidental heroine.

Random House Reader's Circle: Away is loosely based on a real woman in history. Can you tell us a bit about her life, and how you came upon her story? Ultimately, how did you make her story your own?

Amy Bloom: I don't know that I'd call Lillian Alling a "real woman in history." There've always been bits and fragments of a story about a foreign woman, mute or silent by choice, who came up the Telegraph Trail, determined to walk to Russia. There are no records of her arriving in Ellis Island and no records of her life in Alaska and, of course, one of the first questions is: If she didn't speak, how did they know where she was going? I ignored all the fanciful parts and also all the shoddy investigations into her story (this was the golden age of yellow journalism–when whole wars were made up to sell papers) and thought instead: If you weren't crazy or particularly adventurous, why would you make this extraordinary trip? And I thought, I would only do it for love.

RHRC: Lillian Leyb's journey takes her across the globe, from Russia to New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle, to Alaska, to Siberia. Did you chart out her epic journey before writing? How did you conceive the arc of the ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Amy Bloom at BookBrowse
In Love jacket White Houses jacket Lucky Us jacket Where the God of Love Hangs Out jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Amy Bloom 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

  • Diane Ackerman

    Diane Ackerman

    Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of many highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including A Natural History of the Senses -- a book beloved by readers all over the world and the volumes Deep Play, A... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Away

    Try:
    The Zookeeper's Wife
    by Diane Ackerman

  • Louis Bayard

    Louis Bayard

    Louis Bayard is the critically acclaimed bestselling author of nine historical novels, including Jackie & Me and The Pale Blue Eye, which was adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale. His articles, ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    White Houses

    Try:
    Courting Mr. Lincoln
    by Louis Bayard

We recommend 38 similar authors


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Top Picks

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BookBrowse Book Club

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In Our Midst
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In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
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