What is Joanna Hershon reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Joanna Hershon, author of A Dual Inheritance.

Her entry begins:

I’m finally reading The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which—because it’s written by Junot Diaz—is just cracking with energy and humor and bravura from page one. I’m looking forward to getting into the history of the Dominican Republic, getting lost in an unfamiliar world. But I keep cheating on this novel with a book of short stories, Glory Goes and Gets Some by Emily Carter, which...[read on]

About A Dual Inheritance, from the publisher:

For readers of Rules of Civility and The Marriage Plot, Joanna Hershon’s A Dual Inheritance is an engrossing novel of passion, friendship, betrayal, and class—and their reverberations across generations.

Autumn 1962: Ed Cantowitz and Hugh Shipley meet in their final year at Harvard. Ed is far removed from Hugh’s privileged upbringing as a Boston Brahmin, yet his drive and ambition outpace Hugh’s ambivalence about his own life. These two young men form an unlikely friendship, bolstered by a fierce shared desire to transcend their circumstances. But in just a few short years, not only do their paths diverge—one rising on Wall Street, the other becoming a kind of global humanitarian—but their friendship ends abruptly, with only one of them understanding why.

Can a friendship define your view of the world? Spanning from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the present-day stock market collapse, with locations as diverse as Dar es Salaam, Boston, Shenzhen, and Fishers Island, A Dual Inheritance asks this question, as it follows not only these two men, but the complicated women in their vastly different lives. And as Ed and Hugh grow farther and farther apart, they remain uniquely—even surprisingly—connected.

Learn more about the author and her work at Joanna Hershon's website.

Joanna Hershon is also the author of Swimming, The Outside of August, and The German Bride. Her writing has appeared in One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Post Road, the literary anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories.

The Page 69 Test: The German Bride.

My Book, The Movie: The German Bride.

Writers Read: Joanna Hershon.

--Marshal Zeringue