Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Little Book of Feminist Saints
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1987?
WEBSITE:
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Graduated from Barnard College, 2008; http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/07/julia-pierpont-among-the-ten-thousand-things-interview
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1987.
EDUCATION:Barnard College, graduated, 2008; New York University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator.
AWARDS:Prix Fitzgerald (France), for Among the Ten Thousand Things.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including the New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Guardian, and Guernica.
SIDELIGHTS
Julia Pierpont is a teacher and writer, whose work has appeared in publications, including the New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Guardian, and Guernica. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College and a master’s degree from New York University.
Among the Ten Thousand Things
Pierpont’s first book, Among the Ten Thousand Things, won France’s Prix Fitzgerald. In it, she tells the story of the Shanley family, who live on the Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City. Jack, the father, is a sculptor and installation artist, whose work has received critical and monetary success. His wife, Deb, teaches dance lessons and cares for their two children, fifteen-year-old Simon and eleven-year-old Kay. Deb knows that Jack has cheated on her, and she resents it, but the two maintain a relatively stable relationship for their children. However, the delicate balance of the family dynamic comes crashing down when a mysterious package arrives at their apartment. Though it is addressed to Deb, Kay opens the package, which is from a woman Jack has been sleeping with. It contains scandalous emails between the two of them. Kay keeps silent about the package for a time, but she ultimately passes it along to Simon. Simon confronts their mother, which eventually leads to Deb and Jack separating. Deb and the kids go to Rhode Island for a while, and Jack goes to Arizona. Later, they come back together to see if their relationships can be fixed.
In an interview with Eliza Borné, contributor to the BookPage website, Pierpont discussed the theme of infidelity in her book. She stated: “I think adultery, really affairs of any sort, will forever compel our attention: It’s certainly the sexiest of the Ten Commandments one can break. … I was interested in depicting the sort of betrayal that would affect each member of a family, though in different ways. Why should children be so injured by their father’s betrayal of the vows he made, not to them, but to their mother? It isn’t about the children directly, and yet for that very same reason it is, it does hurt them.” Pierpont continued: “And then there is the added complication for the parents, once the kids are brought into it. How much more difficult does it become for parents to move beyond such transgressions without seeming to condone the same amoral behavior that we are taught, as children, to reject?”
Sarah Lyall, reviewer in the New York Times, described Among the Ten Thousand Things as a “sharp, knowing dissection of an unraveling marriage.” Lyall commented: “This is the first novel by Ms. Pierpont, a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program, and it shows a remarkably mature understanding of the delicate emotional balances in families—how feelings can flow back and forth like electricity in some kind of zero-sum game—and the subtle, irrational vicissitudes of people’s psyches.” Lyall concluded: “It is an old story, a crumbling marriage, but Ms. Pierpont gives it fresh insights, making the particular unhappiness (and occasional happiness) of the Shanleys by turns poignant, funny and very sad.” In a lengthy and mixed assessment of the book in Commentary, Fernanda Moore remarked: “Unfortunately, once Deb moves out, Pierpont’s book loses its sharp, original edge. The spur of the moment escape to a (fortuitously unrented) vacation house feels contrived; the convenient presence there of Jack’s art-school chum Gary, who has always carried a torch for Deb, is unconvincing.” However, Moore added: “Two dreamy interstitial chapters–one halfway through the book, one at its very end—save Among the Ten Thousand Things from becoming a generic, if moving and well written, saga of one family’s dissolution.” Moore continued: “These strange, short interludes, which disrupt the novel’s chronology and give the reader a god’s-eye-view of the months and years to come, are vivid and arresting; Pierpont knows exactly which details to highlight, and she deftly evokes the way time passes and the way it seems, in times of crisis, both to accelerate and to stand uncannily still.” New Yorker writer, Laura Kolbe, called the book an “inventive take on the traditional family novel.” Donna Seaman, contributor to Booklist, suggested that Pierpont wrote “with acid wit and thoughtful melancholy.” “For all the book’s sadness, much of its lingering force comes from Pierpont’s sharp-witted detailing of human absurdity. A quietly wrenching family portrait,” asserted a Kirkus Reviews critic. Kate Gray, reviewer in Library Journal, remarked: “Pierpont wields words like beautiful weapons. This short novel is a treat.” A writer in Publishers Weekly opined: “The perennial theme of marital infidelity is given a brisk, insightful, and sophisticated turn in Pierpont’s impressive debut.” Similarly, Maureen Corrigan, contributor to the Fresh Air radio program, asserted: “Among The Ten Thousand Things may deal with that familiar staple of fiction, unhappy families, but it does so in such unexpected ways that it’s a fresh pleasure to read. In fact, it’s such a pleasure that you almost forget that everyone you care about in this novel is miserable.”
The Little Book of Feminist Saints
Pierpont collaborated with illustrator Manjit Thapp on her 2018 volume, The Little Book of Feminist Saints. The volume includes profiles of various women who have been important in the feminist movement. The diverse group of women included are from a range of races and historical eras. Among them are Michelle Obama, Ann Richards, Cecile Richards, Barbara Jordan, the Brontë sisters, Malala, Pussy Riot, Sandra Day O’Connor, Benazir Bhutto, Bea Arthur, and Hellen Keller. Pierpont uses a variety of styles in the profiles of the women in the book and plays with point of view.
Booklist critic, Annie Bostrom, called The Little Book of Feminist Saints “a gloriously diverse, edifying, and curiosity-inspiring collection.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described it as “an enticing collection of biographical portraits of extraordinary women.” The same contributor remarked: “Pierpont’s pithy write-ups are accompanied by Thapp’s funky, wonderfully expressive color illustrations.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer suggested that the entries in the book found “varying degrees of success.” However, the reviewer added: “There are moments when Pierpont strikes the perfect balance between style and content.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2015, Donna Seaman, review of Among the Ten Thousand Things, p. 38; February 1, 2018, Annie Bostrom, review of The Little Book of Feminist Saints, p. 6.
Commentary, October, 2015. Fernanda Moore, review of Among the Ten Thousand Things, p. 77.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2015, review of Among the Ten Thousand Things; January 15, 2018, review of The Little Book of Feminist Saints.
Library Journal, April 15, 2015, Kate Gray, review of Among the Ten Thousand Things, p. 80.
New Yorker, August 3, 2015, Laura Kolbe, review of Among The Ten Thousand Things, p. 73.
New York Times, July 23, 2015, Sarah Lyall, review of Among the Ten Thousand Things, p. C1.
Publishers Weekly, February 2, 2015, review of Among the Ten Thousand Things, p. 32; November 20, 2017, review of The Little Book of Feminist Saints, p. 81.
ONLINE
BookPage Online, https://bookpage.com/ (July 7, 2015), Eliza Borné, author interview.
Penguin Random House Website, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/ (April 12, 2018), author profile.
Vanity Fair Online, https://www.vanityfair.com/ (July 6, 2015), Meredith Turits, author interview.
OTHER
Fresh Air (radio program), July 23, 2015, Maureen Corrigan, review of Among The Ten Thousand Things.
How Julia Pierpont’s Debut Novel Sold for Six Figures Before She Graduated
Among the Ten Thousand Things is obsessively compelling—and it’s one of the most anticipated books of the year.
BY MEREDITH TURITS
JULY 6, 2015 7:34 AM
During the hazy summer months, the books we often tote—on vacation, to the pool, aboard a boat deck—are those that require sporadic attention. We’ve checked out until further notice, and desire a frothy escape, maybe even something we don’t mind leaving at the beach house for the next guests. But this year, the book poised to define summer 2015 and find its place in every bag is anything but a treacly throwaway.
Although Julia Pierpont’s hotly anticipated debut novel, Among the Ten Thousand Things (Random House), drops in the middle of beach-read season, the novel contrasts squarely against the expected. The book is an emotionally sophisticated, nuanced examination of a splintering Upper West Side New York City family, told over the course of a summer, with delicate peeks into the future throughout the narrative.
It begins with a bang: when a box full of correspondence between the family’s father, Jack, and his mistress arrives at his apartment, it falls into the wrong hands—the children’s. As the Shanleys unravel from this moment onward, their beauty and flaws are rendered masterfully by Pierpont: Jack, an artist whose vanity and pride scrapes the bottom of the barrel; Deb, an ex-dancer who can’t seem to figure out her place; 15-year-old Simon, reckless and aloof; and 11-year-old Kay, who should be an innocent bystander in her family’s tragedy, yet is at times too curious for her own good. It’s completely heart-wrenching and obsessively compelling. As Pierpont’s pages fly by, you’ll need to apply more sunscreen—you won’t be going anywhere.
“But what stays buried? Even heavy things have that way about them, of always coming to the surface—especially heavy things do,” Pierpont writes through Simon’s eyes. There’s a worldly intelligence to Among the Ten Thousand Things, as if written by someone decades older than Pierpont’s 28 years. It doesn’t necessarily follow that this is the novel that should arrive from a debut writer, sold at auction while she was still in an M.F.A. program—especially when so many others are churning out 600-page sci-fi epics with movie-franchise dreams, or looking for their place on the thriller shelves as the next Gone Girl; Pierpont’s approach has yielded a story poignant, fresh, and entirely her own.
I met the author on the steps outside Lincoln Center, near the reflective fountain, one unusually brisk June evening. Her mother, also a writer, had written for the New York City Ballet newsletter during Pierpont’s childhood. As we sat, crowds filed past for a New York Philharmonic show, Pierpont admits she wasn’t always so confident in her story.
“Starting the book, I was very reluctant to call it a book or commit to what I was writing about, because I was so afraid of writing about the wrong thing,” she says. “With your first book, there’s a lot of pressure to put everything in there.”
A teacher in her N.Y.U. M.F.A. program encouraged her to pursue the themes of infidelity that kept tugging at her, despite their unfamiliarity. “He just said to me, ‘Don’t worry about that, because you’re not going to accidentally spend all of this time and energy on something you don’t care about. You’re not going to accidentally write about something you don’t care about.’ It gave me this freedom to start anywhere.”
With the aid of famed novelist Jonathan Safran Foer as her thesis advisor, Pierpont plunged into the pages, the first of which were written for Zadie Smith’s workshop class. Foer taught Pierpont to set the bar as high as possible, asking her to imagine her writing as someone’s favorite story ever. “He’d say, ‘Just make it as good as you can.’ And it sounds so useless, but it’s not . . . I knew what he meant. It was weirdly helpful to have someone encouraging you to keep going and pushing you, even in the broadest sense.”
After taking the manuscript as far as she believed she could on her own, while still enrolled at N.Y.U., Pierpont sent out the novel to distinguished agent Elyse Cheney. Cheney took on working with the first-time writer during the summer of 2012, revising and polishing the work. In December, Among the Ten Thousand Things went to auction.
“It was the weirdest day—I was at work and just sort of quietly waiting to hear,” Pierpont says. “Every once in a while, I’d get an update, and just pretend it was a normal day, feeling my heart racing.” When the book found a match with Random House senior editor Noah Eaker in a six-figure deal, Pierpont was thrilled. “We had the same vision for what we felt like we wanted the book to ultimately become.”
What that shared vision has yielded is a novel with a big, beating heart that soars. Against a summer smorgasbord of stories about syrupy flings or crime dramas, Among the Ten Thousand Things rises above for its imagined structure, sentence-by-sentence punch, and pure humanity. Weaving readers through the New York streets with the Shanleys, and in and out of each of their minds as they try to survive the infidelity that’s torn them from the life they’ve built, Pierpont has written a debut so honest and mature that it will resonate with even the most action-hungry readers—perhaps against reason. Her story is the one we’ll be talking about this summer, and well beyond.
Julia Pierpont
J P
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julia Pierpont is the author of the New York Times bestseller Among the Ten Thousand Things, winner of the Prix Fitzgerald in France. She is a graduate of Barnard College and the MFA program at New York University. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives and teaches in New York.
QUOTED: "I think adultery, really affairs of any sort, will forever compel our attention: It’s certainly the sexiest of the Ten Commandments one can break. ... I was interested in depicting the sort of betrayal that would affect each member of a family, though in different ways. Why should children be so injured by their father’s betrayal of the vows he made, not to them, but to their mother? It isn’t about the children directly, and yet for that very same reason it is, it does hurt them."
"And then there is the added complication for the parents, once the kids are brought into it. How much more difficult does it become for parents to move beyond such transgressions without seeming to condone the same amoral behavior that we are taught, as children, to reject?"
Web Exclusive – July 07, 2015
JULIA PIERPONT
The end of the affair
BookPage interview by Eliza Borné
In her perceptive debut novel, Among the Ten Thousand Things, Julia Pierpont examines the effect that an extramarital affair has on one artistic New York City family. We asked Pierpont a few questions about the allure of the affair as a plot device, the brother-sister bond and smutty "Seinfeld" fan fiction.
Many novels are about marital affairs—why people have them, what comes next. Why do you think readers have such an endless appetite for this perennial family conflict?
I think adultery, really affairs of any sort, will forever compel our attention: It’s certainly the sexiest of the Ten Commandments one can break.
In my case, I was interested in depicting the sort of betrayal that would affect each member of a family, though in different ways. Why should children be so injured by their father’s betrayal of the vows he made, not to them, but to their mother? It isn’t about the children directly, and yet for that very same reason it is, it does hurt them. And then there is the added complication for the parents, once the kids are brought into it. How much more difficult does it become for parents to move beyond such transgressions without seeming to condone the same amoral behavior that we are taught, as children, to reject?
“I think adultery will forever compel our attention: It’s certainly the sexiest of the Ten Commandments one can break.”
I enjoyed observing the development of Kay and Simon’s relationship. Do you think their parents’ marital troubles brought them closer?
I’m glad that relationship resonated with you. Initially, yes, when Kay realizes that the only person she feels free to confide in is her brother, that recognition is something that really binds them to each other. They are both their parents’ children: The only two people in the world equipped to share the same burden. But then the way they each process their father’s affair is so different, which is pretty inevitable given their respective ages.
When we meet Simon, he is just embarking on the world of girls and popularity and mild drug use. He’s affected by his parents’ problems, but he’s reluctant to admit it on a conscious level. Kay’s world hasn’t opened up in the same way yet, she’s too young—her family is still everything to her. So Simon finds it irritating to be around his sister’s devastation, while Kay feels estranged by her brother’s apparent indifference.
Do you have a sibling yourself? If so, did you draw from your own sibling relationship to create the dynamic between Kay and Simon?
I’m an only child, which I’m sure has only amplified my interest in sibling dynamics. I remember begging my mother to have another kid—but what I really wanted was an older brother or sister. I would have loved it if she’d somehow managed that.
The four main characters in your novel have very distinct personalities and characteristics—though they’re all relatable in different ways, and it’s a pleasure to follow their stories. Do you have a special fondness for one specific character? Why?
I really did come to love them all—it’s strange now to go on without them. Jack was actually the most fun to write, though he’s liable to be the most difficult character for a reader to like. I think it was his way of looking at the world—even when circumstances were terrible, he’d notice what was funny or absurd about them. He also happens to be the only character with whom I have the least life experience in common, and so in a way he arrived more fully formed, separate from me.
Your novel has an unconventional plot structure. I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll say only that readers do not discover the beginning, the middle, and the end in their natural order. Why did you decide to structure your book in this way? In your opinion, what do readers gain from this choice?
I knew early on that I wanted to look at time. In our lives, just as in the stories we read, there’s always a great deal of importance placed on endings. It’s an understandable, and very human—uniquely human—focus to have, but it can be detrimental to our days as we live them. In the Galway Kinnell poem from which I took my title, as well as the novel’s epigraph, we hear a father address his young daughter about the passing of time, though she is still far too young to understand, urging her to soak up her days on this earth though they will soon be over. There’s a passage in my book that refers to “between-time,” time that we spend waiting to see what will happen next, but which really winds up constituting our whole lives. The structure of the book is meant to remind us: These are the days we have.
Kay’s “Seinfeld” fan fiction is a hilarious entry into the young girl’s creative mind, and it’s a clever way to show how she understands her dad’s infidelity. Why “Seinfeld”? (Did you grow up catching those after-school re-runs?)
Thank you, those sections were fun to write. I watched reruns of sitcoms religiously after school, though when I was really young I was under the impression that the episodes were premiering that day, the way it is with soap operas. I knew I wanted a way into Kay, who’s a very shy, closed-off child—closed off to herself as well as to the people around her—and I thought her feelings could be more believably explored through her writing.
Why “Seinfeld” in particular? Putting aside the fact that I was already tremendously familiar with the show, I liked that it didn’t fall into any of the genres one typically associates with fan fiction, and that the more mature themes Kay would ultimately integrate into her writing would be especially incongruous with the cartoonishness of its characters.
How did you conceive of Jack’s art installation, complete with explosives? Did any real-life artists or installations inspire his work?
It was very important to me that the work be credible. For the most part, Jack’s projects weren’t inspired by any artist’s in particular; rather, they were the product of what I’d been able to glean about the art world and the kind of artist I imagined Jack to be.
There was one real-life artist who inspired some of Jack’s later art, in which he makes images by using the smoke of burning objects to singe his canvases. That artist’s name is Rob Tarbell and I found his smoke art online by total accident a few years ago; he makes these haunting pieces that really stuck with me.
What books are on your own personal summer reading list?
I’m reading Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose novels right now. Then I mean to pick up where I left off with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. So many series lately! Summer’s a good time for them. I read all of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books one summer while I was working behind a dark bar, wishing I were traipsing around Paris or Tangier or wherever Highsmith sent him.
Are there any authors who inspire you over and over?
Oh sure, there are so many. Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster are big for me. Richard Yates, Harold Brodkey. Amy Hempel, Philip Roth, Nicholson Baker. I’m just reading what I love, that’s as inspiring as it gets for me. Lorrie Moore’s “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” was the first book I read that made me want to write. I loved what she was doing and I remember thinking, that, I want to do that.
What can you tell us about your next project?
Not as much as I’d like to! I’ve been working with siblings again, sisters, only this time the characters are closer to my own age, which is something I’ve been predisposed to avoid. It’s enough just to live it, without going home and writing about it too.
QUOTED: "sharp, knowing dissection of an unraveling marriage."
"This is the first novel by Ms. Pierpont, a graduate of New York University's creative writing program, and it shows a remarkably mature understanding of the delicate emotional balances in families—how feelings can flow back and forth like electricity in some kind of zero-sum game—and the subtle, irrational vicissitudes of people's psyches."
"It is an old story, a crumbling marriage, but Ms. Pierpont gives it fresh insights, making the particular unhappiness (and occasional happiness) of the Shanleys by turns poignant, funny and very sad."
What's in the Box? An Ex's Revenge
Sarah Lyall
The New York Times. (July 23, 2015): Arts and Entertainment: pC1(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
AMONG THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS
By Julia Pierpont
322 pages. Random House. $26.
Reading ''Among the Ten Thousand Things,'' Julia Pierpont's sharp, knowing dissection of an unraveling marriage, I kept thinking of Tolstoy's overused remark that ''All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'' Along with ''There are no second acts in American life,'' it has got to be one of the least-true famous literary observations out there.
Who's to say what constitutes happiness, and whether one person's idea of it is the same as anyone else's? Families are complicated. Like most, the one in Ms. Pierpont's book -- Jack and Deb Shanley and their children, 11-year-old Kay and 15-year-old Simon -- drifts along both happily and not happily, kept afloat by some complicated proprietary formula whose proportions are mysterious even to its members. They live in a nice apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Jack is a successful artist who makes large, provocative sculptures and installations that speak to post-Sept. 11 alienation; Deb, a former dancer, now works as a dance teacher and has default responsibility for the kids. Their marriage is hardly perfect (Jack cheats; Deb resents), but it has its own peculiar scaffolding and uneasy equilibrium.
The book begins at the moment when everything collapses. A box of incriminating correspondence -- a deceptively mild-looking thing -- arrives at the Shanleys' home, poised to spray shrapnel everywhere. Sent by Jack's most recent ex-mistress, it contains dozens of printed pages of filthy emails delineating exactly what the couple wanted to do to each other and how. (Adultery Rule No. 1: Do not use email! What do you think Snapchat is for?) Unfortunately, when it arrives, Kay is the only one home. She opens it, thinking it might be an early birthday present.
This is the first novel by Ms. Pierpont, a graduate of New York University's creative writing program, and it shows a remarkably mature understanding of the delicate emotional balances in families -- how feelings can flow back and forth like electricity in some kind of zero-sum game -- and the subtle, irrational vicissitudes of people's psyches. We follow first one character and then another as each tries to manage what has happened. It is an old story, a crumbling marriage, but Ms. Pierpont gives it fresh insights, making the particular unhappiness (and occasional happiness) of the Shanleys by turns poignant, funny and very sad.
The characters command your attention to different degrees. Ms. Pierpont does well with Jack and better with Deb, but the book really comes alive when she gets inside the children's heads and follows them around. Like the best fictional alienated-children-of-New York -- Holden Caulfield; the Brooklyn kids in Noah Baumbach's film ''The Squid and the Whale''; more recently, the teenager at the heart of Peter Cameron's novel ''Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You'' -- Kay and Simon exude an irresistible blend of worldliness and vulnerability, knowingness and cluelessness.
They think they understand a great deal more than they do. It felt very familiar. ''You may know how to get a taxi in New York City,'' my eighth-grade Latin teacher told the class in my own Manhattan school, responding to our latest bit of faux-sophisticated flippancy, ''but you know nothing about the world.''
Simon and Kay really don't. Simon's biggest issue is that, as a teenager, he's much more interested in himself than in what may or may not be going on with his parents. ''It's okay if you guys want to get a divorce,'' he says, opening the refrigerator. ''Can I have a water?'' In one of the funnier scenes in a book full of them, he smokes weed for the first time, with some older kids, and is suffused with the classic paranoia of the neophyte drug-taker. ''Was he high? Was this high?'' Ms. Pierpont writes, as Simon quietly freaks out. ''He felt like a science experiment gone wrong, and what if he just cried in front of them.''
The not-yet-adolescent Kay, meanwhile, hovers awkwardly on the fringes of a group of mean girls who destabilize her by ''negotiating behind long strings of blonde.'' She has become obsessed with, of all things, ''Seinfeld'' fan fiction, and in an episode that can only make you glad it did not happen to you, incorporates some of her father's smutty email into a fan-fiction scene she writes (Jerry and Elaine are married, and Elaine overlooks Jerry's affair). Disastrously, two of the mean girls, twins, get hold of it and tell their mother, and their mother tells Deb. She'd been willing to ride out the crisis until now, but no longer.
The book then shifts to Rhode Island, where Deb takes the children, and to Arizona, where Jack -- who has had a possibly career-ruining experience at the opening of his latest installation -- goes on a desultory work trip. How the family members fare while apart, what they do when they come together, whether they can work it out, how one little seemingly random event, a split second of a poorly-thought-out decision, can affect everything forever -- that's what the rest of the novel focuses on.
Having gotten to know these people and watched their undoing as if it were a slow-motion car accident, we long for a happy ending. There can be second acts in seemingly broken marriages. (Read Jenny Offill's ''Dept. of Speculation'' for a recent literary example.) But in a daring interim chapter called ''That Year and Those That Followed,'' Ms. Pierpont widens her lens, temporarily abandoning her pointillistic moment-by-moment descriptions for a panoramic shot that sweeps years into paragraphs, projecting far out into the Shanleys' future. It has the leaden sting of inevitability and cannot help dampening what is still to come. The die is cast, she seems to be saying. There is no going back.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: PHOTO (C1); The author Julia Pierpont's novel is a mature debut. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SHIVA ROUHANI) (C6)
By SARAH LYALL
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lyall, Sarah. "What's in the Box? An Ex's Revenge." New York Times, 23 July 2015, p. C1(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A422745405/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eccf4a78. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
QUOTED: "a gloriously diverse, edifying, and curiosity-inspiring collection."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A422745405
The Little Book of Feminist Saints
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p6.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Little Book of Feminist Saints. By Julia Pierpont. Mar. 2018.2D8p. illus. Random, $18
(9780399592744). 305.42.
Novelist Pierpont (Among the Ten Thousand Things, 2015) and illustrator Manjit Thapp, who has a devoted
Instagram following, collaborate for this secular daily devotional of activists and writers, artists and
adventurers who defied the roles their eras and circumstances assigned to them. From Sappho to Pussy Riot,
the 99 "matron saints" (some of whom are part of a pair or group) are organized chronologically by their
given feast days. Opposite Pierpont's descriptions, which pull illustrative quotes and often-prescient details
from saints' stories, rather than fully portray them, Thapp's full-color portraits stare at readers, saint-style,
with clear eyes and a cutting gaze in common. Seventeenth-century Mexican nun Juana Ines de la Cruz,
whose thousands of books were confiscated when her writing became too provocative, is the matron saint of
intellectuals; assassinated Pakistani Peoples Party leader Benazir Bhutto is the matron saint of democracy;
and Maya Angelou, who overcame trauma-triggered mutism as a child and published her first book at age
41, is the matron saint of storytellers. A gloriously diverse, edifying, and curiosity-inspiring collection. --
Annie Bostrom
YA: A perfect fit for young feminists. AB.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "The Little Book of Feminist Saints." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 6. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=58bcf83b.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771706
QUOTED: "an enticing collection of biographical portraits of extraordinary women."
"Pierpont's pithy write-ups are accompanied by Thapp's funky, wonderfully expressive color illustrations."
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521931759066 2/13
Pierpont, Julia: THE LITTLE BOOK OF
FEMINIST SAINTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pierpont, Julia THE LITTLE BOOK OF FEMINIST SAINTS Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $18.00 3,
6 ISBN: 978-0-399-59274-4
From novelist Pierpont (Among the Ten Thousand Things, 2015) and British illustrator Thapp, an enticing
collection of biographical portraits of extraordinary women.
The author models her richly varied collection of 100 "feminist saints" on the "Catholic saint-of-the-day
book," offering one-page inspirational snapshots that aim to capture the spirit of her path-breaking subjects
versus history's fuller remembrance of them. Pierpont's pithy write-ups are accompanied by Thapp's funky,
wonderfully expressive color illustrations, making for an engaging picture-book experience for adults. From
Sappho to Malala to Pussy Riot, Pierpont tracks well over two millennia of women's achievements ranging
from the likes of artists, politicians, and scientists to athletes, screen stars, and comics. Though loosely
organized around the calendar year, the portraits may be read consecutively or piecemeal; each offers a
glimpse of one of Pierpont's "matron saints" in her respective element. Thus, March 26 contains a spirited
anecdote from Sandra Day O'Connor, "Matron Saint of Justice," who, in October 1983, wrote to admonish
the New York Times, noting that "for over two years now SCOTUS has not consisted of nine men. If you
have any contradictory information, I would be grateful if you would forward it as I'm sure the POTUS, the
SCOTUS and the undersigned (the FWOTSC) [first woman of the Supreme Court] would be most
interested in seeing it." April 1 is for Wanga
QUOTED: "varying degrees of success."
"There are moments when Pierpont strikes the perfect balance between style and content."
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The Little Book of Feminist Saints
Publishers Weekly.
264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p81.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Little Book of Feminist Saints
Julia Pierpont, illus. by Manjit Thapp. Random House, $18 (208p) ISBN 978-0-399-59274-4
Novelist Pierpont (Among Ten Thousand Things) and illustrator Thapp collaborate to create a patchwork of
biographical sketches on groundbreaking women, from well-known figures such as former first lady
Michelle Obama and the Bronte sisters to lesser-known women such as WWII lieutenant Grace Hopper.
The format plays off the Catholic saint-of-the-day book, meant to be read in intervals as a source of daily
inspiration. Each entry aims to delineate one of the fascinating experiences and contributions of a women
Pierpont and Thapp deem worthy of secular feminist sainthood. Pierpont plays around with style of the
entries with varying degrees of success. The entry on Barbara Jordan, for example, is written entirely in the
second-person, which is distracting and provides no real grounding of Jordan's accomplishments; the same
is true for the entry on Ann and Cecile Richards, which is composed of quotes from the women themselves.
There are moments when Pierpont strikes the perfect balance between style and content; the profiles of
Helen Keller and Bea Arthur, for example, combine the right amount of introductory information with a
written flair that renders these women as worthy idols. Thapp's colorful painted portraits of each subject
enhance the book's appeal. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Little Book of Feminist Saints." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 81. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262118/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d683df0e.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262118
QUOTED: "Unfortunately, once Deb moves out, Pierpont's book loses its sharp, original edge. The spur of the moment escape to a (fortuitously unrented) vacation house feels contrived; the convenient presence there of Jack's art-school chum Gary, who has always carried a torch for Deb, is unconvincing."
"Two dreamy interstitial chapters--one halfway through the book, one at its very end—save Among the Ten Thousand Things from becoming a generic, if moving and well written, saga of one family's dissolution."
"These strange, short interludes, which disrupt the novel's chronology and give the reader a god's-eye-view of the months and years to come, are vivid and arresting; Pierpont knows exactly which details to highlight, and she deftly evokes the way time passes and the way it seems, in times of crisis, both to accelerate and to stand uncannily still."
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Ten thousand ways to leave your lover
Fernanda Moore
Commentary.
140.3 (Oct. 2015): p77+.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Full Text:
Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel
By Julia Pierpont
Random House, 336 pages
AMONG the Ten Thousand Things, Julia Pierpont's debut novel, opens with a letter that aims to shock.
"Dear Deborah," the book begins. "This is a letter about Jack. I began sleeping with your husband last
June." The real shock to the reader, however, doesn't come from the letter's contents. Nor does it come from
the snippets Pierpont subsequently quotes from the accompanying "pages and pages, none of it so romantic,
a lot dirtier than I remembered" of emails Jack's mistress has printed out to show his wife. Our real shock
comes a few pages later, when this package of salacious evidence is mistakenly opened--and read--by Jack
and Deborah's eleven-year-old daughter Kay. "For Mommy," the doorman of their Upper West Side
building says, handing Kay a tantalizing, half-closed box she thinks might contain a birthday present. On
the way up to her family's apartment, she peeks inside.
Numb, horrified, Kay hides the box in her closet and worries. "The box was a secret she kept, the whole
next day at school. She found herself in history, in math, in science, not knowing how she got there, not
remembering the halls." Finally, Kay shows the box to her older brother Simon, "because he was theirs too."
But Simon, who's fifteen, reacts very differently: "He was angrier than she'd thought he'd be, and when he'd
read enough, without saying anything to Kay, who was about to ask what did he think, without even a word
to her, he pushed down on the pages and lifted his chin and shouted: "Mom!""
Among the ten thousand American novels about upper-middleclass families whose charmed lives are
shattered by divorce, Among the Ten Thousand Things surely contains the ghastliest finding-out-he-cheated
scene of all. One minute Deb Shanley is cooking family dinner; the next, she's sitting on her daughter's bed
reading the explicit, first-hand details of her husband's adultery, while her children, who read them first
(Simon "defiantly not crying", Kay "shrinking into the wall, trying to press through plaster") stand
watching. Every lewd detail resonates thrice. "What were the words her kids had read, these awful words
they'd seen?" Deb thinks. And the words--right there in front of us--horrify. Simon and Kay wait as if
paralyzed. "Each minute took all its time."
These agonizing minutes--the dreadful, sickening time between bad news and its painful consequences--
spool out over the days that follow. Deb, it turns out, has known about the affair for months; when Jack
promised to end it, she took him back. Which is unfortunate, since Jack--a conceptual artist who does pretty
much exactly as he pleases--is a cad of the first order. (His marriage to Deb also started with an affair--a fact
she still feels guilty about and he doesn't.) It simply doesn't occur to Jack to worry about Simon and Kay.
Only a few minutes after Deb confronts him with the box of emails, he's actually humming "to himself, to
the night. Things would turn out okay," he thinks. "For him, somehow, they always had, and so they always
would." Pierpont, who switches narrators roughly every chapter, has a real knack for illuminating her
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characters' personalities from the inside out; we therefore experience Jack's selfishness first hand. Here he
is, the following morning in his studio, letting himself deftly off the hook:
Marrying Deb, having the
kids, all that was right. It was
he who'd gone wrong, or the
world. He'd felt it these last few
years. Something to do with
the Internet and jihad and all
the natural disasters they'd been
having: There was a buzz in the
air that made it harder to move
forward, a feeling that they were
living in a time with no future.
And then there had been that
girl, in her see-through blouses
with the breasts under them,
soft and pointed up like curious
things. With her full lips and full
ass, and how did she stay so full
when everything else every day
was being depleted, when--
Listen, look:
It's not like I killed anybody.
By the end of the page, Jack has practically convinced himself he's done his family a favor. "True, it was
hard on the kids, but that was why he wanted to explain ..." he thinks. "The girl was a channel that let him
be a better man at home." We roll our eyes, but Pierpont has done her job: Jack is a type, yet his personality
is vivid and all too believable. He's that vexing conundrum: the self-absorbed jerk who utterly lacks malice.
By the time life catches up to him, as it eventually does, we've essentially forgiven him his trespasses.
Deb comes across as nobler and much less interesting than Jack: though she spends the novel preoccupied
with the children, she persistently botches her concern. (She worries much too much about Simon, whose
"anger" is largely bluster, and not nearly enough about Kay.) Tucking Kay in that first night, Deb does her
well-intentioned best. Sometimes married people meet someone new and exciting, she says, and sometimes
they make mistakes. "But it doesn't mean anything," she says. "And it isn't about you." This sounds exactly
like the sort of thing one should tell a worried child at bedtime, yet Deb only succeeds in making Kay feel
worse. "Where she'd gone wrong, it was just a word, how could she have known," Kay thinks after her
mother leaves, awake and miserable in bed. "What she should have said: It doesn't mean everything'.'
Kay's attempt to puzzle out just how much divorce does mean, how much infidelity matters, is the best
scene in the book. In idle moments, Kay likes to dream up Seinfeld plots; after having read Jack's ob scene
emails, she brainstorms a few ideas. "Jerry and Elaine are married.... George gets a letter by mistake from a
woman who is having an affair with Jerry. He goes to Monk's to tell Elaine, and she is like, So?" Kay
writes, on the bus to a school field trip.
George says: "But she said she is sleeping with your husband! Jerry!" And Elaine's still like, Yeah, so?
LAUGHS. George says: "She said she wanted him to lick her on the nipples!" Elaine puts her hand on the
table like she's about to leave and says: "Listen, Peterman has me writing about urban riding crops. I don't
have time for this."
The episode continues--becoming more pornographic and more legitimately hilarious by the line--until a
nosey classmate snatches Kay's notebook. ("Perv," she sneers. Kay shrivels in shame.) Of course the
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classmate's mother calls Deb, who begins packing in a frenzy. "She'd made her first very big decision... she
would take the three of them to Rhode Island, " though neither kid wants to go. "[Deb's friend] Izzy had
asked where they were summering. So? Here was summer."
Unfortunately, once Deb moves out, Pierpont's book loses its sharp, original edge. The spur of the moment
escape to a (fortuitously unrented) vacation house feels contrived; the convenient presence there of Jack's
art-school chum Gary, who has always carried a torch for Deb, is unconvincing. (Like most of the novel's
other secondary characters, Gary feels more like a plot device than a person. The minute he's no longer
required, he disappears in a puff of smoke.) Pierpont doggedly describes the weeks that follow, but the
episodes don't quite add up. Simon gets a girlfriend, Kay drifts here and there, Deb flirts both with Gary and
with the idea of forgiving Jack, and the reader resists the urge to skip. Instead of feeling fraught, the
summer just feels aimless.
Yet two dreamy interstitial chapters--one halfway through the book, one at its very end--save Among the
Ten Thousand Things from becoming a generic, if moving and well written, saga of one family's
dissolution. In the first, Pierpont describes the vacant Shanley apartment, suspended in eerie stillness.
"Folds in the mostly made beds sank deeper into themselves. Stains stayed stains, in the hampers and
dresser drawers. In the kitchen, a milk-clouded spoon fixed to its bowl and magnets drifted down the
refrigerator," she writes. "Only the wireless went on, invisibly complicating the air." In the second, she pans
ahead to Simon and Kay's adulthood. These strange, short interludes, which disrupt the novel's chronology
and give the reader a god's-eye-view of the months and years to come, are vivid and arresting; Pierpont
knows exactly which details to highlight, and she deftly evokes the way time passes and the way it seems,
in times of crisis, both to accelerate and to stand uncannily still. Seasons change, a family comes home, the
children pass into difficult phases and out of them. A marriage ends. Wisdom teeth erupt. Pets sicken,
parents die. Apartments are sold. Children grow up. "The end is never a surprise," Pierpont writes, after a
few dazzling pages of perfectly evocative prose. But what she means, perhaps, is that the end might not
actually matter. Among the Ten Thousand Things succeeds most when Pierpont pays close attention to the
fraught, surreal moments at the quiet center of every upheaval. 'We thought we were living in between-time,
after this and before that," Pierpont writes, though it's neither clear nor important which of her characters is
speaking. "But it's the between-time that lasted."
Fernanda Moore last reviewed Jonathan Franzen's Purity. Her short fiction has appeared in Commentary as
well.
Moore, Fernanda
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Moore, Fernanda. "Ten thousand ways to leave your lover." Commentary, Oct. 2015, p. 77+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A430963038/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=40222216. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A430963038
QUOTED: "inventive take on the traditional family novel."
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Among The Ten Thousand Things
Laura Kolbe
The New Yorker.
91.22 (Aug. 3, 2015): p73.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The
Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
AMONG THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS
by Julia Pierpont (Random House).
This inventive take on the traditional family novel nods at bellwethers of the genre but feels as if it could
only have been written yesterday. The milieu of the Shanley family is one of women "always in yoga
pants," sitcom fan fiction, and bad yet arresting Times Square art. The novel's crux is the potential
dissolution of Jack and Deb's marriage, yet, daringly, Pierpont races forward in time mid-book, defusing
suspense and allowing readers to relish instead her garish but pleasurably textured New York, "like one of
those living history exhibits, commemorating an old war." The Shanley children, bumbling explorers of
marijuana and pornography, are sweetly inept, yet Jack and Deb marvel at their sangfroid in the immense
and shifting city.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kolbe, Laura. "Among The Ten Thousand Things." The New Yorker, 3 Aug. 2015, p. 73. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A424137273/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3ab93391.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A424137273
QUOTED: "with acid wit and thoughtful melancholy."
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Among the Ten Thousand Things
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
111.19-20 (June 1, 2015): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Among the Ten Thousand Things. By Julia Pierpont. July 2015.336p. Random, 526 (9780812995220).
There is nothing unusual about the plot of Pierpont's first novel about a New York family of four. Jack is
caught having an affair, and now he and his wife, Deborah, and the kids, 15-year-old Simon and 11-year-old
Kay, have to figure out how to deal with it. Although countless novels take flight from this predicament,
Pierpont's concentrated domestic drama is piquantly distinctive, from its balance of humor and sorrow to its
provocatively off-kilter syntax, original and resonant descriptions, bristling dialogue, snaky psychological
insights, and escalating tension. And all the particulars are intriguing. Jack, a Texan, is a successful artist
about to detonate his career. Deborah is a former ballerina turned teacher who, having grown up in the
suburbs, is a touch intimidated by her city kids. The revelation of Jack's affair hits Simon and Kay like a
bomb. As they reel, their grandmothers are pulled into the maelstrom, and certain family members behave
atrociously. With acid wit and thoughtful melancholy, Pierpont catalogs the wreckage, mourns the death of
innocence, and measures varying degrees of recovery, achieving a Salingeresque ambience. --Donna
Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Among the Ten Thousand Things." Booklist, 1 June 2015, p. 38. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A421080170/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d62aa0d7.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A421080170
QUOTED: "For all the book's sadness, much of its lingering force comes from Pierpont's sharp-witted detailing of human absurdity. A quietly wrenching family portrait."
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Pierpont, Julia: AMONG THE TEN
THOUSAND THINGS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2015):
COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pierpont, Julia AMONG THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS Random House (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 7
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9522-0
Long-simmering tensions boil over in the Shanley household to devastating effect in debut novelist
Pierpont's drama of domestic unravelling. It's not that the news contained in the anonymous package is a
surprise to Deb: not the hundreds of emails documenting her husband's affair and certainly not his lover's
cliched confessional which accompanies it. It's that her 11-year-old daughter, Kay, stumbled upon the box
first and that she and her 15-year-old brother, Simon, have now read their father's messages ("i can't explain
why i get so sad when you make me so happy") that makes the reality unbearable. And so begins the
dissolution of the Shanleys or, at least, the Shanleys as they once were: Jack, the successful sculptor and
not-unlikable narcissist married to Deb, the former ballet dancer who happily traded her career for
motherhood. As their marriage crumbles, Jack and Deb set out on separate courses away from New York.
Meanwhile, Kay and Simon contend with the loss while navigating their own coming-of-age struggles. We
know how the story ends because Pierpont tells us: a spectacularly melancholy interlude midway through
puts an end to any suspense. But suspense is hardly the point; it's the characters' rich emotional lives that
propel the story forward. Deb and Jack and Simon and Kay could easily have been reduced to types--the
suffering wife, the womanizing husband, the stoned teenage son, the sensitive tween daughter--but in
Pierpont's hands, they're alive: human, difficult, and deeply lonely. It's loneliness that's at the novel's core,
hitting unsentimentally and with blunt, nauseating force. Which is not to say that there isn't serious humor
among the heartbreak (Kay's penchant for writing Seinfeld fan fiction is a particular delight), and for all the
book's sadness, much of its lingering force comes from Pierpont's sharp-witted detailing of human
absurdity. A quietly wrenching family portrait.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Pierpont, Julia: AMONG THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2015. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A411372286/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5a4e376d. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A411372286
QUOTED: "Pierpont wields words like beautiful weapons. This short novel is a treat."
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Pierpont, Julia. Among the Ten Thousand
Things
Kate Gray
Library Journal.
140.7 (Apr. 15, 2015): p80+.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Pierpont, Julia. Among the Ten Thousand Things. Random. Jul. 2015. 336p. ISBN 9780812995220. $26;
ebk. ISBN 9780812995237. F
Recent MFA grad Pierpont's first novel is an expertly crafted story of a family in crisis. She opens with a
letter to Deb, a married mother of two, from the "other woman." In a cruel twist, Deb's 11-year-old
daughter, Kay, finds the epistle first, along with copies of all the dirty and romantic emails her father, Jack,
sent his mistress. This disturbing episode throws the reader into the middle of the family drama that may not
be distinct but perhaps has never been this well articulated. The author plays with the narrative, giving us a
snapshot of the characters' lives to come over the following decades before zeroing in on the immediate
aftermath. After a few disastrous weeks coping at home in Manhattan, Deb takes the kids to a family beach
house in Rhode Island, while Jack, an installation artist at a crossroads in his career, flies to Texas. We hear
alternating perspectives from Jack, Deb, Kay, and 15-year-old Simon, all of whom are richly drawn and
heartbreakingly sympathetic. VERDICT Pierpont wields words like beautiful weapons. This short novel is a
treat for fans of Jonathan Franzen, Jami Attenberg, and Emma Straub, and shows off an exciting new voice
on the literary landscape. [See Prepub Alert, 1/12/15.]--Kate Gray, Worcester P.L., MA
Gray, Kate
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gray, Kate. "Pierpont, Julia. Among the Ten Thousand Things." Library Journal, 15 Apr. 2015, p. 80+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A409550308/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0df9e539. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A409550308
QUOTED: "The perennial theme of marital infidelity is given a brisk, insightful, and sophisticated turn in Pierpont's impressive debut."
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Among the Ten Thousand Things
Publishers Weekly.
262.5 (Feb. 2, 2015): p32.
COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Among the Ten Thousand Things
Julia Pierpont. Random, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-8129-9522-0
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The perennial theme of marital infidelity is given a brisk, insightful, and sophisticated turn in Pierpont's
impressive debut. When their father's emails to his former mistress are inadvertently discovered by siblings
Kay Shanley, 11, and Simon, 15, the result is the unraveling of the family. Their father, Jack Shanley, is a
well-known conceptual artist and self-indulgent seducer, and he sees his career go downhill due to a variety
of circumstances. Deb, his wife, carries guilt from having broken up Jack's first marriage, only to realize
that he's an inveterate womanizer who feels his indiscretions should be forgiven. Pierpont's keen
observational gaze illuminates a strata of Manhattan society in which money and privilege abide alongside
the gritty, drug-and-alcohol-fueled margins of social behavior. She is also particularly adept at portraying
alienation in the young (Kay starts writing dirty Seinfeld fan fiction in a notebook; Simon reads The
Fountainhead because he knows his mother doesn't want him to) and the parents' awkward attempts to
communicate with their self-protective children. Her sense of humor surfaces, especially in a scene at a
gallery opening, when Jack's carefully planned and shocking installation goes awry. Pierpont throws an
audacious twist midway through the book, giving the slow, painful denouement a heartbreaking
inevitability. This novel leaves an indelible portrait of lives blown off course by bad choices, loss of trust,
and an essential inability to communicate. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Among the Ten Thousand Things." Publishers Weekly, 2 Feb. 2015, p. 32. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A401094056/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=78048286.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A401094056
QUOTED: "Among The Ten Thousand Things may deal with that familiar staple of fiction, unhappy families, but it does so in such unexpected ways that it's a fresh pleasure to read. In fact, it's such a pleasure that you almost forget that everyone you care about in this novel is miserable."
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Infidelity Is Steeped In Suspense In
'Among The Ten Thousand Things'
Fresh Air.
2015.
COPYRIGHT 2015 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use
and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush
deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final
form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's
programming is the audio.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=13
Full Text:
To listen to this broadcast, click here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=425001457
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. A just-published debut novel about an age-old topic has caught the attention
of our book critic, Maureen Corrigan. Here's her review of "Among The Ten Thousand Things."
CORRIGAN: Talk about opening with a bang. At the beginning of Julia Pierpont's debut novel, "Among
The Ten Thousand Things," an 11-year-old girl named Kay Shanley enters the lobby of her New York City
apartment building. We readers have already been clued in to the fact that Kay is the kind of awkward, shy
preteen other girls ridicule. We just want her to get safely into her family's apartment and back to watching
the "Harry Potter" movies she loves. But just as the elevator doors are closing, the door man signals for her
to hold up. He hands her a package addressed to her mom, who's called Deb. Because the flaps of the
package are merely tucked in, not taped, because Kay spies something pink where the flaps don't meet and
because that spot of pink makes her hope the package is a present for her that her mom has ordered, Kay
opens it. Before you can say, Pandora's box, evil flies out in the form of pages and pages of printed emails -
many of them graphically erotic - between Kay's father and a woman he has had an affair with. Kay doesn't
even know the meaning of some of the words she sees, but she does get the meaning of the cover note, the
obscenely pink thing that lured her in. It's a letter from the other woman to Kay's mother. And it reads in
part, (reading) dear Deborah, I began sleeping with your husband last June. We were together for seven
months.
If Pierpont simply took it from there and chronologically traced the fallout of this terrible knowledge on
Kay, her older brother Simon and her parents, then "Among The Ten Thousand Things" would deserve a
nod as a closely observed work of domestic fiction. But what sets Pierpont apart from the pack of other
accomplished young graduates of elite creative writing programs - she went to NYU - is her storytelling
chops. The chapters that follow that dramatic opening make it clear that there are going to be as many
ingenious twists and turns in this literary novel as there are in a top-notch work of suspense, like "Gone
Girl." The effect is dizzying. As a reader, you feel, as the Shanleys do, that the earth keeps shifting beneath
your feet. Early on, here's how we're told that Jack Shanley, an artist and the dad now in the doghouse,
somewhat smugly assumes the future will play out.
(Reading) His wife would fight with him, really just yell, because who can fight with a spineless thing? A
misshapen, regretful thing that curls up and sleeps with white flags waving like wind shield wipers. She'd
get sick of yelling, of crying. When she cried, Kay cried, Simon cried. They'd speak to him only when his
physical presence was an impediment, when he was blocking the refrigerator and they needed him to move.
And then they'd be over-polite.
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Because Pierpont doesn't want her readers to get caught up solely in the suspense about whether or not
Kay's parents will stay together or divorce, she does something nervy right in the middle of this novel. She
inserts a glimpse into the future. Then, after our curiosity about the Shanleys is satisfied, we readers are
asked to turn our full attention back to those first raw weeks after that box of printed emails arrives - smart.
Pierpont's gift for offbeat construction and for telling descriptions extends to less weighty scenes as well.
There are comic moments scattered around here, mostly via quick, rye observations. When, for instance,
Deb, a former ballet dancer, heads off to meet a more successful dancer friend, we're told that the two
women were going to lunch because each had been waiting for the other to cancel. Making dates only to
call them off was how they kept in touch. "Among The Ten Thousand Things" may deal with that familiar
staple of fiction, unhappy families, but it does so in such unexpected ways that it's a fresh pleasure to read.
In fact, it's such a pleasure that you almost forget that everyone you care about in this novel is miserable.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University and is the author of "So We Read
On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures." She reviewed the novel "Among The Ten
Thousand Things," by Julia Pierpont. If you'd like to catch up on recent interviews you missed with people
like Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian McKellen and Amy Schumer with Judd Apatow, check out our podcast.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Infidelity Is Steeped In Suspense In 'Among The Ten Thousand Things'." Fresh Air, 23 July 2015. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A423834269/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a1cf8ced. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A423834269