What is Lynn Kilpatrick reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Lynn Kilpatrick, author of the short story collection, In The House.

Her entry begins:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

So many people recommended this book I had to pick it up. Many of the conversations I had about this book began with someone saying to me, “I liked it, but…” and having finished it, I’d have to say that I agree. The book felt extremely French to me, or maybe more like a French film, with a lot of talking and not a lot of action. I love books that include meditations on ideas or philosophical investigations, and this book was full of those. Overall, I loved the book, though I found the ending disappointing. But the writing is...[read on]

Among the praise for In The House:

“With astonishing agility and the sharp edge of terrifying humor, Lynn Kilpatrick slits the fragile skin of identity to expose a thousand marvelously dangerous possibilities. You might be the child who disappears or the girl who becomes Miss America. Either way, your life is precarious, held in place by your own tenuous illusions and the wild confabulations of the woman on the other side of the glass, your bold, inventive neighbor.”
--Melanie Rae Thon, author of Sweet Hearts

“In The House is a dazzlingly smart and deeply funny excavation of what goes on behind closed doors. Lynn Kilpatrick’s characters are at once utterly bizarre and entirely recognizable and the stories she tells about them in you-have-to-go-back-and-read-that-sentence-one-more-time-because-it’s-so-damn-good prose are tender and sharp and full of heart. This is a book that is brave enough to say what most of us won’t and wise enough to remind us why that kind of bravery matters.”
--Cheryl Strayed, author of Torch

Lynn Kilpatrick’s fiction has recently appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and Hotel Amerika. Her essays have been published in Ninth Letter, Creative Nonfiction, and Brevity. She earned her PhD in Fiction from the University of Utah and an MA in Poetry from Western Washington University. She teaches at Salt Lake Community College and lives in Salt Lake with her husband, son and German Shorthair Pointer.

Visit Lynn Kilpatrick's website.

Writers Read: Lynn Kilpatrick.

--Marshal Zeringue