Saturday, July 23, 2011

Carmela Ciuraru's 6 favorite pseudonymous books

Carmela Ciuraru is the author of Nom de Plume: A Secret History of Pseudonyms.

Carmela Ciuraru is not a pseudonym. Her anthologies include First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them (Scribner) and Solitude Poems (Alfred A. Knopf/Everyman’s Library). A graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN American Center. She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, O, The Oprah Magazine, and other publications.

She is a 2011 Fellow in Nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

For The Week magazine, Ciuraru named her favorite pseudonymous books, including:
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.

Eighteen science-fiction stories compose the only collection by Tiptree that remains in print. Considering that Tiptree was in fact Alice Sheldon, a former Chicago debutante, it’s no wonder that "his" subversive themes explore gender roles and power. Sheldon passed as a successful male writer for more than a decade, but after her identity was exposed, she never recovered. She committed suicide in 1987.
Read about another book on the list.

See Carmela Ciuraru's list of ten great books by pseudonymous authors.

--Marshal Zeringue