Christine Schutt

Braddock Avenue Books Interview

2013-03-20T08:19:00.002-07:00

An interview on line with Braddock Avenue Books

read more
www.braddockavenuebooks.com/street-talk/post/company-we-keep-interview-christine-schutt-author-prosperous

Book review from Open Letters Monthly

2013-02-19T17:56:00.003-08:00

(Greg Gerke) - What the fiction writer can do with words is a kind of delimiting and impossible question. Words tell stories but they also make impressions, dancing on our minds with their alacrity or ellipsis or some combination of the two. Good story or good words? The debate will rage on. Christine Schutt traffics in the kingdom of words and sentences, yet, like Ingmar Bergman, she has a narrative territory all her own: craggy relationships, the travails of girls growing into women, astonishing sexuality, and the general violence of our emotions and compulsions. These are the stories most common to fiction, to cinema, to life. In Prosperous Friends, Schutt examines these benchmarks while again displaying her incomparable passion for the sentence.

Read the full review at www.openlettersmonthly.com

Washington Independent Review of Books

2013-01-15T16:23:00.003-08:00

"I could hardly put it down, the spare novel as much of a page turner as any thick thriller, a book that yields new insights into character and relationships the more you poke your nose into it."

---Harriet Douty Dwinell

read more at washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com

3:AM Magazine Award to Prosperous Friends

2013-01-11T16:59:00.000-08:00

Full details at www.3ammagazine.com

LA Time Review of 'Prosperous Friends'

2013-01-04T15:09:00.001-08:00

'Prosperous Friends' by Christine Schutt observes a lonely couple

"With terse sentences that read like poetry, Schutt strips each scene of excess context and cuts to the heart of the moment. Her prose evokes emotions more vital to the novel: frustration and despair juxtaposed with understanding and desire.

The characters instantly come to life with a clever turn of phrase or a well-crafted sentence. . .

Like flipping through a diary of fleeting memories, we hope for love in one scene and breakdown with Isabel the next. In a collection of carefully thought-out moments, Schutt's haunting yet lyrical words linger long after the final page."

-Rosanna Xia

Read the full review at www.latimes.com

Malcolm Forbes of The Star Tribune Reviews Prosperous Friends

2013-01-04T08:53:00.001-08:00

"Schutt captures a marriage on the rocks and then charts the ensuing landslide in language that is by turn poetically mesmeric and brutally unsentimental."

She favors atmosphere, beguiling us with scant, brittle prose, and impressing with forensic attention to detail. She expertly compresses her tragedy into a series of tight, taut, bite-sized traumas instead of long, drawn-out conflicts. Miniature time-shifts jerk us backwards and forward ("The dog died, he crossed the Rainbow Bridge, but before that ...") and ragtag images and fractured thoughts jostle in the same sentence. ("After the smear of lunch, blue skies and a chance to play with watercolors, sleep, no swimming today.") Schutt's writing dazzles while it disorients.

This is a beautiful but disquieting novel about broken vows and hearts, with husband and wife learning the hard way that "there may be cures to loneliness but marriage is not one of them."

- Malcolm Forbes

read more at startribune.com

Prosperous Friends in Salon's 2012 Ultimate Book Guide

2013-01-02T14:19:00.001-08:00

“Prosperous Friends” makes the love triangle passé geometry. Instead, Schutt arranges her characters in a hexagon of erotic codependency and longing: handsome Ned, a struggling fiction writer shoved toward memoir; his pretty wife, Isabel, capable only of caring for strays; Clive, the distinguished Maine painter Isabel sits for, who renders her into a canapé while his own wife looks on; Clive’s ill and inconvenient adult daughter. This book will unravel all you’ve stitched together about how to tell a story. It will rip down the middle the tidy seam where we fasten doing well to doing good.

Read the entire list at www.salon.com

The New Yorker Best Books of 2012, P.S.

2012-12-25T09:21:00.000-08:00

Christine Schutt’s “Prosperous Friends” was another revelation this year, a devastating story of young love, old love, and no love, written with a razor, it would seem, on living skin.

read more at : newyorker.com

LA Review of Books on Prosperous Friends

2012-12-19T06:51:00.002-08:00

David Winters on Prosperous Friends
Difficult Intimacies: Christine Schutt’s Dark Portraits of Marriage

PICK UP A BOOK by Christine Schutt, and you’ll be struck straight away by her style. In two short story collections and three novels, she’s honed a language that feels wholly hers: a carefully cadenced poetic prose that warrants being read reverently, aloud. I’ll say it right now: I believe Prosperous Friends proves Schutt to be one of the finest stylists alive. Praised by the likes of Lydia Davis and John Ashbery, Schutt has been called a “writer’s writer.” Yet if her style is “writerly,” it’s not estrangingly so. She doesn’t indulge in insular word games, fashioned for a refined few. What she does instead is draw out a secret world of love and suffering, which, once it is revealed to us, we recognize as our own ... read more at lareviewofbooks.org

http://www.themillions.com/2012/12/a-year-in-reading-christine-schutt.html

2012-12-19T06:49:00.005-08:00

A Year in Reading on The Millions

Antonio Munoz Molina, Sepharad

Tinge Literary Magazine Interview

2012-12-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

Tinge Magazine Interview

www.tingemagazine.org

San Francisco Chronicle Review

2012-12-08T19:12:00.004-08:00

Author Christine Schutt has been a National Book Award finalist (for her novel "Florida") and a Pulitzer Prize finalist (for her novel "All Souls"), yet she is still best described as a "writer's writer's writer": a creator of exquisite sentences, admired by other writers, and not read nearly enough by everyone else.

Her latest novel, "Prosperous Friends," deserves a wide readership.

"Prosperous Friends" explores tough terrain with no edifying conclusions. Yet it is gorgeously written, and full of sharp insights into love, aging, sex and ambition. The characters, despite themselves, prove sympathetic."

Read more at sfchronicle.com

Christine Schutt on KCRW's Bookworm

2012-12-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

Michael Silverblatt interviews Christine on Thursday, December 6 on KCRW. If you missed it, don't worry. You can listen to the entire interview by clicking here.

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw

New Yorker Reviews Prosperous Friends

2012-12-05T19:00:00.000-08:00

“Schutt’s third novel is intimate and tough, a portrait of a doomed marriage that forgoes melodrama for quiet truth. … Schutt deftly captures the complexity of these difficult, sophisticated people.” –The New Yorker

Read more @ The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com/

Reading for HENRY in NYTimes

2012-11-29T13:44:00.003-08:00

HENRY films serious writers reading three-minute snippets from their work. The NY Times has a blog about it here: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/book-forum/?hpw

“Our aim is to provide access to literary readings for people who don’t live in proximity to KGB Bar or the small places in Brooklyn where readings are usually held,” said Katherine Bernard, a writer for Vogue and the Paris Review Daily, who founded the site with her boyfriend, Shayne Barr, a Columbia M.F.A. writing graduate, and Jerone Hsu, the founder of the think tank Prime Produce.

Watch the video on henryreview.org too!

Interview with Shelf-Awareness

2012-11-21T10:51:00.002-08:00

Book Bramin: Christine Schutt

On your nightstand now:

Antonio Munoz Molina's Sepharad, recommended to me by Mark Strand, a deeply affecting novel about nothing.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Margaret Flack's The Story About Ping, about a domesticated Chinese duck lost on the Yangtze River. Spanking as a punishment terrified me then, as did the perils that befall Ping in avoiding this punishment.

Read the full interview at Shelf-Awareness

info@shelf-awareness.com

The Washington Post: It's Unhappily Ever After

2012-11-21T10:45:00.002-08:00

Book World: It’s unhappily ever after in Christine Schutt’s ‘Prosperous Friends’

“ ‘Are you sure?’ the doctor asked.

“She did all the unsightly crying things, and both men watched. She used the sleeve of her yellowed nightgown on her face.

“ ‘You’re in agreement?’ the doctor asked.

“ ‘Yes,’ and they said yes at the same time, so Ned and Isabel must have been in agreement.”

Schutt deals killing blows with such short, precise movements that at first you barely register the wound. Her portrayal of sexual dysfunction manages to be just as cringe-inducing as it is oblique.

Read more at washingtonpost.com.

New York Journal of Books Review

2012-11-19T08:47:00.001-08:00

“Ms. Schutt has a stark, scientific eye and an artist’s voice.”

In Prosperous Friends, Christine Schutt’s crafting of three parts minimalism and one part stream-of-consciousness with rigorous lyricism of voice results in not so much a love story as a dissection of the possibility of love.

"Ms. Schutt has a stark, scientific eye and an artist's voice."

Reviewed by Rae Bryant. Read the full review at nyjournalofbooks.com

Atmospheric Disturbances

2012-11-16T14:28:00.001-08:00

“A…disposition to illuminate peaks of cognizance amid humdrum circumstance invests Schutt’s latest novel, Prosperous Friends, with an almost electric charge… Like James, Schutt penetrates to the core energies of human drama with a pointillist’s touch; feeling is lent graceful shape, less readily apprehensible, but ultimately more incisive. …Prosperous Friends presses adventurously against mere telling’s quotidian restrictions and attempts to enact “the lyrical impulses of the soul.””

-Bookforum, Albert Mobilio

Page 69 Test: Prosperous Friends

2012-11-14T14:58:00.002-08:00

Schutt applied the Page 69 Test to her newest novel, Prosperous Friends, and this is what she found:

"What I had hoped to find on page sixty-nine of Prosperous Friends was a recurring note in the novel’s song about love and marriage and ambition, and here it was then: together on a first date, Clive Harris and Isabel Bourne, met at a wedding a year before where Clive first kissed her. Here is part of the melody: the easy, unwise seduction of an uncertain woman by a practiced, dangerous man."

Read more at page69test.blogspot.com

Prosperous Friends makes DC Spotlight TOP10

2012-11-14T14:55:00.005-08:00

The language of Christine Schutt’s latest novel is jarring to those accustomed to journalistic prose, but the relationship between Ned Bourne and his wife Isabel rings uncomfortably familiar. Their lives resemble the space after the unfinished dialogue and they aren’t sure if the lack is in themselves or in each other. Joyce and Fitzgerald enthusiasts will savor this capsule of modern-day ennui.

Read more at dcspotlight.com.

Shelf-Awareness Review

2012-11-05T18:14:00.003-08:00

"Prosperous Friends is a beautifully painted picture of a very ugly couple."

Three great reviews of Prosperous Friends

2012-11-05T13:52:00.001-08:00

Marie Claire, California Literary Review, Sirius Radio "Book Talk" all recently reviewed Prosperous Friends. Click below to see what they wrote:

Marie Claire / review / Oct 25
http://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity-lifestyle/reading-guide-prosperous-friends#slide-5

California Literary Review / review / Nov 5
http://calitreview.com/31933

Sirius XM Martha Stewart Radio “Book Talk” / interview / Nov 1
http://www.christineschutt.com/files/BookTalk02Nov2012.mp3

WSJ Review of Prosperous Friends

2012-11-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal on Prosperous Friends:

". . .Isabel's transformation stands out. Ms. Schutt depicts her rattled consciousness with quick, painterly strokes--a glancing, impressionistic style that owes a happy debt to Virginia Woolf. . .From the unpromising material of connubial misery, Ms. Schutt has formed genuine moments of beauty and hope." - Read the full review

New York Observer on Prosperous Friends: "marvelous and startling."

2012-10-27T10:02:00.001-07:00

Read the full review

“A small but powerful work of craftsmanship…Prosperous Friends is intimate and alien as a dream. Like poetry, it rewards careful reading, and though brief, the questions it raises linger, unanswerable and self-complicating… Prosperous Friends, like all of Ms. Schutt’s fictions, is an island ecosystem—a Madagascar, a Galapagos—evolved in isolation, where new and strange forms thrive; the results are marvelous and startling.” –New York
Observer