Ashley Nelson Levy received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Clein-Lemann Esperanza Fellowship. Her work has been a notable mention in Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she’s the recipient of the Bambi Holmes Award for Emerging Writers. In 2015, she cofounded Transit Books, an independent publishing house with a focus on international literature.
Immediate Family is her first novel.
At Electric Lit she tagged seven books that "represent many kinds of middle states: characters may be trapped in grief, political exile, new motherhood, or the neighborhood of their youth." One title on the list:
Want by Lynn Steger StrongRead about another entry on the list.
Elizabeth, a Ph.D. who can’t land a university position, has two jobs that still hardly pay the rent. She plays hooky to read books in bars and cafes, while at home in Brooklyn she has two young girls, a husband, and not enough money in the bank—she and her husband must file for bankruptcy. She sets her alarm for 4:30 am to take long, cold runs through the city, as if it might help to break free from it all. At the heart of this novel is an unsparing exploration of female friendship and middle-class economic precarity, but some of my favorite parts are about how much of life is occupied by the mundane, and how this rubs up against our desire for it to feel differently.
--Marshal Zeringue
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