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Marisa Silver

Biography

Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver is the author of THE MYSTERIES (2021); LITTLE NOTHING (2016), a New York Times Editor's Choice and winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction; MARY COIN (2013), a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller's Award, and an NPR and BBC Best Book of the Year; ALONE WITH YOU (2010); THE GOD OF WAR (2008), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction; NO DIRECTION HOME (2005); and BABE IN PARADISE (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her short fiction has won the O. Henry Prize and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic.com and many other publications, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.

In 2018, Silver was awarded the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts. She teaches at The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Marisa Silver

Books by Marisa Silver

by Marisa Silver - Fiction

Miggy Brenneman is a wild and reckless seven-year-old with a fierce imagination, hellbent on pushing against the limits of childhood. Ellen is polite, cautious and drawn to her friend's bright flame. While the adults around them adjust to unstable times and fractured relationships, the girls respond with increasingly dangerous play. When tragedy strikes, all the novel's characters grapple with questions of fate and individual responsibility --- none more so than Miggy, who must make sense of a swiftly disappearing past and a radically transformed future.

by Marisa Silver - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In an unnamed country at the beginning of the last century, a child called Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival, conceived in part by gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, stuns her parents and brings outrage and scorn from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf, but as the years pass, she grows no farther than the edge of her crib. When her parents turn to the treatments of a local charlatan, his terrifying cure opens the floodgates of persecution for Pavla. LITTLE NOTHING unfolds across a lifetime of unimaginable, magical transformation in and out of human form, as an outcast girl becomes a hunted woman whose ultimate survival depends on the most startling transfiguration of them all.

by Marisa Silver - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of a road in Central California is spontaneously photographed by a woman documenting the migrant laborers who have taken to America’s farms in search of work. Little personal information is exchanged, and neither woman has any way of knowing that they have produced what will become the most iconic image of the Great Depression.