July 2015
Photo © Sigrid Estrada.
Lisa Gornick is the author of the just released “novel in fragments”, Louisa Meets Bear (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which received starred reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Booklist, as well as two earlier novels: Tinderbox (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and A Private Sorcery (Algonquin). Her stories and essays have appeared widely, including in AGNI, The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, and Slate, and have received many awards, including a distinguished story citation in the Best American Short Stories anthology. She holds a B.A. from Princeton and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at NYU and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.
"Those who enjoy literary novels of psychological portent will relish this title."
—Library Journal
"Gornick's brilliantly constructed third novel (after Tinderbox) offers a seamless series of events, spanning from 1961 to 2009, that explore the full spectrum of life in all its bizarre coincidences, tragedies, and passions… Gornick captures all the heartbreak and joy of what it is to be human."
—Publishers Weekly, ***Starred Review***
"Coming full circle in a way that is both oddly surprising and yet feels organically right, Gornick's (Tinderbox, 2013) exploration of loneliness and loss, private connections and personal upheavals resonates with comforting familiarity and profound brilliance. Utterly human and keenly humane, her heroes and heroines are our friends and enemies, our very selves for better and worse."
—Booklist, ***Starred Review***
"...Turning the pages is a pleasure…There is betrayal, sadness, and tragedy… but apart from all this, it's the realistic portrayal of relationships and personalities that carries the book."
—Publishers Weekly
"This vivid portrait of a family unravelling is perfect for book clubs."
—Sue Corbett, People Magazine, ***Four Stars***
"Lisa Gornick’s second novel, Tinderbox, will certainly be compared to Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed The Corrections. And it should be, since Gornick creates a world of characters every bit as complex and flawed—and as real—as Franzen’s subjects."
—Juli Berwald, Jewish Book Council
Louisa Meets Bear by
When Louisa and Bear meet at Princeton in 1975, sparks fly. Louisa is the sexually adventurous daughter of a geneticist, Bear the volatile son of a plumber. They dive headfirst into a passionate affair that will alter the course of their lives, changing how they define themselves in the years and relationships that follow. Lisa Gornick'sLouisa Meets Bearis a gripping novel in interconnected stories from an author whose work "starts off like a brush fire and then engulfs and burns with fury" (The Huffington Post). ReadingLouisa Meets Bearis like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, as we uncover the subtle and startling connections between new characters and the star-crossed lovers. We meet a daughter who stabs her mother when she learns the truth about her father, a wife who sees herself clearly after finding a man dead on her office floor, a mother who discovers a girl in her teenage son's bed. Each character is striking, each rendered with Gornick's trademark sympathy and psychological acuity. We follow them over the course of a half century, from San Francisco to New York City and from Guatemala to Venice, through pregnancies, tragedies, and revelations, until we return to Louisa and Bear. With flawed and deeply human characters, and piercing insight into the lives of women,Louisa Meets Beargrapples with whether we can--or can't--choose how and whom we love.
Tinderbox by
When you invite a stranger into your home, you never know who's really coming in . . . Myra is a Manhattan psychotherapist. A quick study and an excellent judge of character, she thinks she knows what she's getting when she hires a nanny--it's her job, after all, to analyze people. Her phobia-addled son has just moved back in with his wife and child, and the new nanny, Eva, seems like a perfect addition: she cleans like a demon and irons like a dream, and she forms an immediate bond with Myra's grandson. But as Eva, a Peruvian immigrant, reveals more of herself, what seemed a felicitous arrangement turns ominous. She racks the household with screams from a night terror. She spits in her hands to ward off evil spirits. Then, one afternoon, she settles into Myra's patient chair and begins to expose the secrets of her past. Their relationship slowly and inexorably becomes too close, too dependent, and, ultimately, terrifyingly destructive. As events spiral out of Myra's control, she learnsthat even a family as close-knit as her own can have plenty to hide. In the rich tradition of Lionel Shriver, Jane Hamilton, and Anne Tyler, the psychoanalyst and novelist Lisa Gornick tells us a story about the tragedy of good intentions.Tinderbox spins a suspenseful mystery of hidden traumas. It's a searingly perceptive, deeply honest novel about families and secrets, and power, and love.
A Private Sorcery by
Saul Dubinsky, a sensitive, shy psychiatrist, was living a dual life. Following the attempted suicide of one of his patients, the dedicated young doctor turned to drugs. When he's arrested on criminal charges, his wife and his father are left to figure out how things went so wrong and why they were blind to the pain of the man they both love. Saul's emotionally remote wife, Rena, confronts the failures of their marriage and, for the first time, faces her shame about her fatherless, hardscrabble past. Saul's father, Leonard, who'd long ago given up practicing psychiatry, blames himself for his son's breakdown. He finds that he can no longer escape the memory of the troubled patient who changed the course of his own career nor deny his complicity in his wife's illness. As Rena and Leonard each grapple with the impact of Saul's arrest, they are drawn closer together-and a delicate transformation begins to occur in each of them. This is an immensely satisfying and ultimately triumphant story abouat the precarious balance within a family and about the unconscious ways in which we affect the lives of those we love most. Full of wisdom and insight, A PRIVATE SORCERY marks the debut of a talented writer.
