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Meet Author Jill Bialosky

In conversation with Paula McLain

Join us when authors Jill Bialosky and Paula McLain visit to discuss Bialosky's new novel, The Deceptions.

About the author:

Jill Bialosky is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, including Asylum, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award; three critically acclaimed novels, including, The Prize; a New York Times best-selling memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life; and Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir. Her work has been a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Books for a Better Life Award. In 2014, she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry. She is an executive editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City. 

In The Deceptions, an unnamed narrator’s life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys’ prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum’s austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft. As secret betrayals and deceptions come to light and rage threatens to overwhelm her, the pantheon of gods assume remarkably vivid lives of their own, forcing her to choose between reality and myth in an effort to free herself from the patriarchal constraints of the past and embrace a new vision for her future.

Jill Bialosky will be in conversation with Paula McLain, the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Love and Ruin, Circling the Sun, The Paris Wife, and A Ticket to Ride, the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, and two collections of poetry. Her most recent novel is When the Stars Go Dark. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, O: The Oprah Magazine, Town & Country, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She lives in Ohio with her family.

Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.