Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Strangers in Budapest
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Keener, Jessica Brilliant
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jessicakeener.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: one son.
EDUCATION:Boston University, B.A.; Brown University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Manuscript consultant, Grub Street. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, senior proposal writer. Worked formerly as a fiction teacher at Brown University, University of Florida, Miami, and Boston University; as an ESL teacher; as a senior fiction editor at Atlantic; and as a fiction reader for Agni.
AWARDS:Redbook’s fiction contest second prize winner, “Recovery;” Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant recipient.
WRITINGS
Story contributor to numerous periodicals, including Southeast Review, Chariton Review, Northwest Corridor, Night Train, Eclectica, Wilderness House Literary Review, Connotation Press, Nervous Breakdown, and Huffington Post; freelance article contributor to numerous periodicals, including Boston Globe Magazine, O, Oprah Magazine, Inspired House, Coastal Living, Design New England, and Poets & Writers.
SIDELIGHTS
Jessica Keener is a writer and writing consultant. She grew up in the greater Boston area. Kenner graduated high school early to study English at Boston University. After graduation from Boston University she received a full scholarship from Brown University to study creative writing. At Brown, she studied creative fiction writing and taught a fiction workshop to freshman.
After graduating from Brown with an M.F.A., Keener got married and moved with her husband to Miami, Florida. There she taught ESL and literature and composition to freshman at the University of Florida, Miami. Keener and her husband lived in Atlanta, Budapest, and Portland, Maine, before finally settling in Massachusetts, where they raised their son and Keener began teaching at Boston University.
Keener’s stories have been published in Southeast Review, Chariton Review, Northwest Corridor, Night Train, Eclectica, Wilderness House Literary Review, Connotation Press, Nervous Breakdown, and Huffington Post. She also contributes freelance articles to numerous periodicals, including Boston Globe Magazine, O, Oprah Magazine, Inspired House, Coastal Living, Design New England, and Poets & Writers. In addition to being a creative writer, Keener is a Grub Street manuscript consultant and a senior proposal writer for Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Night Swim
Night Swim, Keener’s debut novel, centers around Sarah Kunitz, a sixteen-year-old growing up in 1970s America. Sarah’s family, which is situated in an upscale suburb of Boston, is Jewish, but Sarah is not bothered by the occasional antisemitic slur she encounters at school. Nor does she care much for politics or the war in Vietnam. What does catch her attention, however, is Anthony, her classmate and a player on the football field. She is happy to spend her sixteenth year reading comics, listening to music, and flirting with Anthony.
Sarah’s world gets turned upside down when her mother, a beautiful musician, dies in a car crash. Sarah must now learn to grapple with the grief of her mother’s death, a wound that will never fully heal, while managing other highs and lows of life, such as her father’s new girlfriend and her own budding romance with Anthony. Juli Berwald in Jewish Book Council website wrote “Keener’s writing is lovely; she manages to build sentences that are both precise and ornate,” while Hazel Rochman in Booklist noted: “This memorable debut will strike a universal chord with readers.”
Women in Bed and Strangers in Budapest
Keener’s Women in Bed is a series of nine short stories, all focused on women and their relationships to wanting and desire. The women that populate the stories range from college-aged youth to individuals adjusting to retirement. Several stories return to the same character, and the theme of failing to hear or be heard recurs throughout the collection. A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that Keener “demonstrates a versatile voice and ability to deliver as much exquisite detail as the stories’ brevity will allow.”
Strangers in Budapest, Keener’s second novel, is a story of two expats who have relocated to modern-day Hungary. Annie and Will have moved to Budapest in the hopes of starting a new business and new life together. The formerly Soviet-occupied city has not fully recovered from occupation, and locals resent the onslaught of foreigners in their fragile city. At the request of friends back home, the two will also be helping Edward Weiss, a 76-year-old man in Budapest, to hunt down his late daughter’s husband, who Edward believes murdered the woman. As Annie and Will adjust to their new life and work through personal conflict, the story takes a dark turn as Edward’s violent past comes to light. Jen Baker in Booklist described the book as “heavily atmospheric, replete with metaphors evoking a deep-set melancholy and fatigue.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2011, Hazel Rochman, review of Night Swim, p. 23; September 1, 2017, Jen Baker, review of Strangers in Budapest, p. 48.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of Strangers in Budapest.
Publishers Weekly, August 26, 2013, review of Women in Bed, p. 44.
ONLINE
Jewish Book Council, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (April 22, 2018), Juli Berwald, review of Night Swim.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (December 22, 2013), Heather Partington, review of Women in Bed.
Reach me a few ways:
Literary agent:
Emma Sweeney at Emma Sweeney Agency
245 East 80th Street, Suite 7E, NYC, NY 10075
www.emmasweeneyagency.com
Publicist at Algonquin Books:
Brooke Csuka
Brooke@Algonquin.com
email me at:
jessicakeener1@gmail.com
My personal timeline goes a bit like this:
I grew up in the greater Boston area (and if you're from Newtonville you'll remember me as Jessica Brilliant).
-Graduated early from high school because I couldn't wait to get out and explore the world outside the classroom.
-Eventually, got my B.A. (with honors) in English from Boston University.
-Picked up my diploma and then checked into a hospital for a bone marrow transplant. (I was fatally sick with a rare blood disease called Aplastic Anemia. For 2.5 months I lived in a sterile room. After I left the hospital, I spent another year avoiding germ-infested crowds. The happy ending to this part of my life is that the transplant worked. A complete cure.)
-Awarded a full-tuition scholarship from Brown U. based solely on writing excellence.
-Received a Masters degree in creative writing (fiction). Taught a fiction workshop to freshman.
-Married a wonderful man. We moved to Miami, Florida where I taught ESL, then freshman lit and comp. at U. of Miami, FL. and after a few more moves (Atlanta, Budapest, Portland, ME, Boston) we landed in Massachusetts. Raised our beautiful son. And our dog, a fish, a cat, and two degus. Taught writing at Boston University.
-Worked one summer critiquing manuscripts for the Senior Fiction editor at The Atlantic.
***
Early on, I devoted a lot of time to writing short stories, a form I love. My story, "Recovery," won second prize in Redbook magazine's fiction contest and is part of my new collection: Women In Bed. Over the years, my fiction has been listed in The Pushcart Prize under 'outstanding writers' and published in many literary magazines and online sites including The Southeast Review, Chariton Review, Northwest Corridor, Night Train, Eclectica, Wilderness House Literary Review, Connotation Press,The Nervous Breakdown, and Huffington Post. Other stories have been finalists or place winners in various contests.
I am also a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in fiction.
In recent years I've been on some radio shows including a National Public Radio interview with John Ydstie. I've also been a guest on Reading with Robin radio show, Brad Listi's wonderful Other People Podcast, and David Brudnoy's radio show.
For ten years, I read and helped selection fiction submissions for Agni, one of the nations' top literary publications.
In 1997, started freelancing full-time for The Boston Globe Magazine and other national magazines including O, The Oprah Magazine, Inspired House, Coastal Living, Design New England and Poets & Writers. These days, I'm working on a new novel; I'm a Grub St. manuscript consultant, and I work as a senior proposal writer for Brigham and Women's hospital. My novel, STRANGERS IN BUDAPEST, will be coming out Fall 2017 with Algonquin Books.
All best,
Jessica
P.S. You will find earlier works of mine under my full name: Jessica Brilliant Keener (Brilliant is my birth name.)
You can reach me by email: jessicakeener1@gmail.com (Don't forget to include the "1" after jessicakeener1@....)
Strangers in Budapest
Jen Baker
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Strangers in Budapest. By Jessica Keener. Nov. 2017. 352p. Algonquin, $26.95 (9781616204976).
Heavily atmospheric, replete with metaphors evoking a deep-set melancholy and fatigue--"the emotional
sludge of rage"--Keener's second psychological novel (following Night Swim, 2012), set in modern
Hungary, dramatizes both national and personal outcomes of harrowing past events. Budapest hasn't
recovered from Soviet occupation, and locals resent the influx of Western business opportunists. Americans
Annie and Will hope to start a new life and a business in Budapest, and at the request of their good friends
back home, involve themselves with the elderly Edward Weiss, who needs their help. In the midst of an
oppressive summer heat wave, Weiss, a widower, is a sick, angry man with a gun. The plot spirals outward,
a spider's web with a menacing enemy in some hidden corner and sticky connections. Despite the book's
bleak tone, Annie, Will, and Edward all draw our interest as people to care about, and Budapest becomes a
powerful symbol of past horrors, lush culture, and an uncertain future. Reminiscent of Hilary Mantel's Eight
Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), with its clueless immigrants abroad, and similar in tone and theme to
Kim Brooks' historical novel, The Houseguest (2016).--Jen Baker
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Baker, Jen. "Strangers in Budapest." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 48. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161575/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=08acce79.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161575
4/22/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524441351855 2/4
Keener, Jessica: STRANGERS IN
BUDAPEST
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Keener, Jessica STRANGERS IN BUDAPEST Algonquin (Adult Fiction) $26.95 11, 14 ISBN: 978-1-
61620-497-6
Budapest in 1995 is supposedly on the brink of post-communist economic revival, but the American expats
who inhabit Keener's second novel (Night Swim, 2013) can neither adjust to the city's deep-seated
complexity nor escape the problems they hoped to leave back home.Annie and Will arrive with their
adopted baby, Leo, so Will can pursue a startup creating "communication networks." Unfortunately, Will, as
seen through Annie's eyes, is a research nerd with little aptitude for entrepreneurship. Annie hopes to escape
what she considers intrusive involvement by the social worker who arranged Leo's adoption. A one-time
social worker herself (an irony Annie misses), she makes ham-handed attempts to help the locally hated
Roma population. After eight months, Will has yet to close a deal when his former boss Bernardo, a gladhander
Annie doesn't trust, shows up with an enticing offer. Bernardo hires Stephen, another expat, who has
moved to Budapest to connect with his parents' homeland; they fled Hungary for America after the 1956
uprising but never recovered emotionally. The story of his father's suicide touches a chord in Annie, herself
haunted by a tragic accident that destroyed her family's happiness when she was 4. Meanwhile, 76-year-old
Edward is in Budapest to track down his late daughter Deborah's husband, Van. Edward believes Van
murdered Deborah though the official cause of death was related to her multiple sclerosis. The only
character besides Annie with a revealed inner life, Edward is embittered by his experience as a Jewish
WWII soldier. He disapproved of Deborah's hippie lifestyle and her attraction to men he considered losers,
like Van. Over Will's objections, and the readers' disbelief, bleeding-heart Annie agrees to help Edward find
Van. A bad idea. As for Budapest itself--polluted, in physical disrepair, plagued by an ugly history, and
populated by rude, corrupt, and bigoted locals--the author strongly implies that the misery and mayhem
Annie experiences are the city's fault. Expect readers of this unpleasant hate poem to Budapest to cancel
any plans they've made to travel there.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Keener, Jessica: STRANGERS IN BUDAPEST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192370/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=43595649.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192370
4/22/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524441351855 3/4
Women in Bed
Publishers Weekly.
260.34 (Aug. 26, 2013): p44.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Women in Bed
Jessica Keener. The Story Plant (www.thestoryplant.com), $11.95 trade paper (162p) ISBN 978-161188075-
5
If Keener's first short story collection, following her debut novel Night Swim, can be said to have a theme,
it might be women's struggles to reconcile relationships--be they with friends, family, lovers, or enemies--
with changing perspective and internal turmoil. In the wrenching "Woman with Birds in Her Chest," a
newly unemployed woman searches for purpose through volunteer work at a hospice. A waitress finally
gets a chance to spend time with the regular who intrigue's her, with disappointing results, in "Secrets."
Several stories ("Boarders," "Bird of Grief," "Heart") visit the same character at different phases of her
romantic life: a naive college dropout on the verge of being rejected by her boyfriend; a habitual liar and
serial monogamist; and, finally, a woman working at stability with a long-distance lover. The most
interesting and memorable relationships in these stories are directly adversarial--a student and her
antagonistic professor in "Papier-mache," a young girl and her petty tyrant of a landlord in "Boarders," a
woman and her jealous husband in "Shoreline"--but Keener can convey subtler dynamics with equal skill.
Although the collection sometimes drags, she demonstrates a versatile voice and ability to deliver as much
exquisite detail as the stories' brevity will allow. Agent: Emma Sweeney, Emma Sweeney Agency. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Women in Bed." Publishers Weekly, 26 Aug. 2013, p. 44. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A341367130/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=463ddc50.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A341367130
4/22/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524441351855 4/4
Night Swim
Hazel Rochman
Booklist.
108.8 (Dec. 15, 2011): p23+.
COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Night Swim.
By Jessica Keener.
Jan. 2012. 280p. Fiction Studio, paper, $13.95 (9781936558261).
When her mother is killed in a car accident, Sarah, 16, lives in "a cavity of pain," and each chapter in this
eloquent first novel captures the teen's anger, guilt, loneliness, and sorrow at her wrenching loss. Part of a
Jewish family in a rich 1970s Boston neighborhood, she is not into politics, uninterested in Nixon and
Vietnam, not much bothered by the occasional "dirty Jew" slur she hears at school. She likes comics and
music and her gorgeous classmate Anthony. What does enrage her is Dad's relationship with his new
girlfriend. Always true to the teen's viewpoint, the spare prose will hold readers as Sarah fights with her
brothers, bonds with the housekeeper, tries to blame her dad for the accident (why did he let Mama drive
alone?), and deals with her first sexual relationship. Rooted in personal sorrow, this memorable debut will
strike a universal chord with readers: "Life was full of befores and afters."--Hazel Rochman
YA/M. The teen's viewpoint will hook YA readers, especially those who have lost a loved one. HR.
Rochman, Hazel
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rochman, Hazel. "Night Swim." Booklist, 15 Dec. 2011, p. 23+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A275850752/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3178738e.
Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A275850752
THE SUNDAY RUMPUS REVIEW: WOMEN IN BED BY JESSICA KEENER
BY HEATHER PARTINGTON
December 22nd, 2013
What sends us to our beds? Desire, sure. Sex. But also sickness. Sleep. Loneliness and healing. Jessica Keener’s Women in Bed is a collection of nine stories about women at all stages of life and wanting. Various degrees of acceptance. Each asking to be seen and heard. Each, “[craving], like questions yearning for answers.” Keener writes specifically of love. Romantic relationships figure prominently in the majority of the tales, but there is also a thread of development– the articulation of self–that runs from the first tale through the last, linking the women in her stories through the fundamental experience of what it means to be female. Her characters yearn to be noticed and understood, yet often have a hard time making themselves clear to the people around them.
41-GAXTJFgL._SY346_In Women in Bed, Keener leads us through a lifetime of searching. Her characters’ lives, taken together, are social commentary on the arc of relationships over a lifetime. This is a collection about women who are students, women who are lovers, women who blur lines. These are women who look for ways to fill up the hours. These are women running away, women aching to be held. These are women yearning for validation. We come of age, our eyes “open to the world,” but what then? Keener suggests that we come into ourselves—with great difficulty—through the relationships we pursue from our college years into retirement.
There’s a steady rhythm to the opening story, “Secrets,” a tale of a young waitress’ fling with a customer who challenges her to break out of a rut. These are characters who speak in simple, direct exchanges. But they often don’t hear each other; they speak past each other, lost in their own agendas.
“I’m glad we met,” she says. I don’t like many people.”
“You don’t know me, I remind her.”
Though the heat from the oven smells good, it is hard to breathe. Her windows are high up and small.
“I’ll open the door,” she says. And we’ll eat. I hope you like chicken.”
“Is it safe here?”
“There was a voyeur.”
The meter of Keener’s characters’ speech shifts in each story; her ability to capture dialogue and its different variations is quite compelling, particularly the way she renders the variation in speech of women at different stages of life.
Like “Secrets,” the story “Shoreline” is another conversation between two characters that struggle to hear each other and to make themselves clear. “Shoreline” is about a married couple breaking up, but we also see them before, and after. Their messy beginning and end swirl into a moment of decision. Keener manipulates time through a series of italicized insets:
“When we got home, he watched the sports roundup. I went upstairs and hid the book in my sweater drawer. A steady rain was no time to drive people around, so I called the office for messages.
Every day the sweat breaks into a misty web across my breasts. Every day I cross this space, cross this sand, this problem between Jim and me. But the problem shifts without sound underneath, eludes me like the driftwood I see slowly twisting its way along the shoreline.”
She captures subtle shifts through subtext. Her prose is sparse and clean. She writes with as much attention to what is unsaid as what is.
My one disappointment with this otherwise lovely collection is that Keener relies heavily on analogy and metaphor, sometimes using intangible comparisons to render images that are already clear. Some of the metaphors she draws on—like the bird, for example—are so familiar that they don’t feel fresh. “Woman with Birds in Her Chest” is a delicate tale about Cynthia, a woman who retires from hard work in the healthcare industry only to find that her life lacks meaning. “It was hard getting air,” Cynthia thinks, “like birds flying in her chest, their wings caught in her ribs.” The inclusion of another story titled “Bird of Grief” soon after this one underscores Keener’s use of the same image and undermines its uniqueness in the first story. Keener’s writing style leans more toward metaphor and simile—something that I am sure some readers will enjoy and, probably, seek out. At times I just wished for her to be more direct, since the simple impact of her prose is powerful.
Keener’s women are most compelling when they take action: move, go after lovers, make poor choices. The two stories that deal with healthcare and hospitals, “Women with Birds in Her Chest” and “Recovery” are particularly poignant, as they explore the duality of giving and receiving care. The juxtaposition of these two stories shows how we find meaning outside romantic love, and Keener writes about the world of caring for the sick with an insider’s eye.
In the way that the traditional Bildungsroman chronicles the development of a character from youth to adulthood, Keener’s collection captures the essence of moving from one adulthood to another. Perhaps it is more fitting that we see this develop through the disparate lenses of her characters’ lives, as it is the accumulation of relationships over a lifetime that determines what our stories will be.
Heather Scott Partington is writer, teacher, and book critic. Her writing appears at The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares’ Blog, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Las Vegas Weekly, Electric Literature, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA in Fiction from UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Campus. Heather teaches high school English and lives in Elk Grove, California with her husband and two kids. Follow her @HeatherScottP. More from this author →
Night Swim
Jessica Keener
Fiction Studio Books 2012
279 Pages $13.95
ISBN: 978-193655826-1
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Review by Juli Berwald
If you’ve ever immersed yourself in inky, nighttime waters you know that the feeling is disorienting, terrifying, and exhilarating. So too, is the sixteenth year of life for Sarah Kunitz, the protagonist in Jessica Keener’s first novel, Night Swim.
It’s 1970. Sarah’s life in a swanky suburb of Boston includes flirting with the hunky Italian guy on the football team, enduring fights between her older brother and her overbearing patriarchal father, being irritated with her fantasy-loving younger brother, and attending strained family Passover celebrations. It’s typically dysfunctional.
But that all changes when Sarah’s mother, a beautiful and broken musician, heads into an alcohol-assisted tailspin that ends in her death. The strings that have always tied Sarah’s world together fray, and then unravel.
Through the year, Sarah learns to live with wounds that will never fully heal. She realizes, “the question mark – my mother – stayed with me, followed me wherever I went. She floated inside, a buoy without a boat.” And in the process, Sarah gains the maturity and strength to gather up some of the strings of her old life, and weave a new one.
Keener understands deeply that scene writing creates powerful moments for her characters. We learn of Sarah’s irritation, fear, reticence, and desire not through discussion, but through her actions and interactions with others. And Keener’s writing is lovely; she manages to build sentences that are both precise and ornate. While Keener’s Night Swim tells of a girl who has lost her bearings, her hold on her novel is both assured and poised.