Dear Edna Sloane
Dear Edna Sloane is a funny, fast-paced epistolary novel about fame, writers, ambition, and the ups and downs of a creative life.
Edna Sloane was a promising author at the top of her game. Her debut novel was an instant classic and commercial success, vaulting her into the heady echelons of the 1980s New York City lit scene. Then she disappeared and was largely forgotten. Decades later, Seth Edwards is an aspiring writer and editor who feels he's done all the right things to achieve literary success, but despairs that his dream will be forever out of reach. He becomes obsessed with the idea that if he can rediscover Sloane, it will make his career. His search for her leads to unexpected places and connections, and the epistolary correspondence that ensues makes up this book, a novel infused with insights and meditations about what our cultural obsession with the "next big thing" does to literature, and what it means to be a creative person in the world.
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Amy Shearn is the author of the novels How Far Is the Ocean from Here, featured as a notable debut by Poets & Writers and the Chicago Tribune; The Mermaid of Brooklyn, a selection of Target's Emerging Authors program and a Hudson News Summer Reads pick; and Unseen City, the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards' Gold Medal in Literary Fiction. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, O, The Oprah Magazine, and several anthologies. A native Midwesterner, she earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her two children.
"I've long been an ardent, near-obsessive fan of Amy Shearn's sophisticated, hilarious, big-hearted fiction, and with Dear Edna Sloane, she once again knocks it out of the park. This charming, compulsively readable novel-which I read in one sitting, laughing out loud every few minutes--brilliantly satirizes the literary world in a manner that reminded me, somehow, of both Laurie Colwin and Candace Bushnell, Curtis Sittenfeld and, more than any other writer, Taffy Brodesser-Akner. But what fuels this tour de force--aside from Shearn's pitch-perfect tone and precise, urgent sentences--are her complex, lovable characters and their emotionally resonant thoughts and ideas. I wanted to live inside this book forever."
--Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
"Oh to be inside Amy Shearn's head to figure out how she wrote such a wise, witty, and brilliantly knowing novel about the literary life and how authors connect to readers--and to themselves. Seth, a hungry young writer, sets out to find a once-famous and now-vanished novelist, Edna Sloane, sure his discovery will set him up in the literary stratosphere. And here is where things get outrageously creative, because much of his search is told through correspondence, and the deeper his search for Edna, the more his truest--and sometimes uncomfortable--self emerges. Delightful, insightful, and so, so wonderfully meaningful to anyone who truly cares about the arts. I just loved this."
--Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, Cruel Beautiful World, and With or Without You
