Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's most recent collection of fiction, What We Do with the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her two previous collections are Swimming with Strangers and This Life She’s Chosen, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick of the Month.
Elita is her first novel. She lives near Seattle.
At Lit Hub Lunstrum tagged five works of literature featuring wild children, including:
Jane Eyre, Charlotte BrontëRead about another novel on Lunstrum's list.
How can I end this list without Jane, for who is wilder than Jane? I found Jane Eyre on a library shelf when I was in middle school—the same age my students are now. I was in my own period of dark stillness then, and Jane presented awholly new (to me) alternative to the girl-protagonists I had loved before her. Prickly and plain, blunt-spoken and too moody, Jane felt to me like a kind of soulmate, a literary mirror. She refuses capture again and again, unyielding in her need to understand herself above all else. My book takes its epigraph from Brontë, Atalanta’s and Bernadette’s story beginning with Jane’s call to freedom: “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.” When she eventually returns to Rochester at the close of the novel, it is not as a submission, but as a partner. She tells her reader that it is she who leads him, taking his hand to walk the first steps into their new life. “We entered the wood,” she tells her reader, “and wended homeward.” Home, Jane Eyre reminds the reader, is always and only where the self can be free—on the other side of the dark wood.
Jane Eyre also made Christina Henry's list of five top novels featuring brave women in mysterious circumstances, Hannah Sloane's list of seven titles about men breaking hearts & acting despicably, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's top ten list of novels and stories about prophets, Jane Shemilt's list of five books that trace the portrayal of mental disorders in literature, Lucy Ellmann's top ten list of gripes in literature, Elizabeth Brooks’s list of ten of the creepiest gothic novels, Kate Kellaway's list of the best romantic novels that aren’t riddled with cliches, Julia Spiro's list of seven titles told from the perspective of domestic workers, Jane Healey's list of five favorite gothic romances, Annaleese Jochems's list of the great third wheels of literature, Sara Collins's list of six of fiction's best bad women, Sophie Hannah's list of fifteen top books with a twist, E. Lockhart's list of five favorite stories about women labeled “difficult,” Sophie Hannah's top ten list of twists in fiction, Gail Honeyman's list of five of her favorite idiosyncratic characters, Kate Hamer's top ten list of books about adopted children, a list of four books that changed Vivian Gornick, Meredith Borders's list of ten of the scariest gothic romances, Esther Inglis-Arkell's top ten list of the most horribly mistreated first wives in Gothic fiction, Martine Bailey’s top six list of the best marriage plots in novels, Radhika Sanghani's top ten list of books to make sure you've read before graduating college, Lauren Passell's top five list of Gothic novels, Molly Schoemann-McCann's lists of ten fictional men who have ruined real live romance and five of the best--and more familiar--tropes in fiction, Becky Ferreira's lists of seven of the best fictional depictions of female friendship and the top six most momentous weddings in fiction, Julia Sawalha's six best books list, Honeysuckle Weeks's six best books list, Kathryn Harrison's list of six favorite books with parentless protagonists, Megan Abbott's top ten list of novels of teenage friendship, a list of Bettany Hughes's six best books, the Guardian's top 10 lists of "outsider books" and "romantic fiction;" it appears on Lorraine Kelly's six best books list, Esther Freud's top ten list of love stories, and Jessica Duchen's top ten list of literary Gypsies, and on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best governesses in literature, ten of the best men dressed as women, ten of the best weddings in literature, ten of the best locked rooms in literature, ten of the best pianos in literature, ten of the best breakfasts in literature, ten of the best smokes in fiction, and ten of the best cases of blindness in literature. It is one of Kate Kellaway's ten best love stories in fiction.
The Page 99 Test: Jane Eyre.
--Marshal Zeringue
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