A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Her work has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Harvard Review, Star Tribune, The Millions, and on the Ploughshares blog. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, Ucross, and Saltonstall. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts.
At Electric Lit Thomas-Kennedy tagged eight books that use "a party’s celebratory chaos as a backdrop for something important, whether dramatic conflict or quiet realization, to brilliant effect." One title on the list:
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth StroutRead about the other entries on the list.
One of Strout’s most complex and unforgettable characters, Olive Kitteridge anchors the majority of these linked stories set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is jarringly blunt, but she is also consumed by compassion for herneighbors, and is often the voice, or offers the literal hand, that hauls people out of despair. At her son’s wedding reception, Olive finds even the slightest sensory detail to be antagonistic: other people’s clothing, the sound of a door closing, the odor of a guest’s perfume. Against the backdrop of the wedding—a “smallish, pleasant affair”—and the reception that follows, Strout reveals that beneath Olive’s gruff refusal to play along is deep-seated fear. Of the newlyweds, Olive has an astonishing flicker of silent insight: “They think they’re finished with loneliness.” Overwhelmed with conflicted feelings for her son—her desire for his happiness, and her doubt that he may have found it—she hides away from the party in his bedroom. Even lying on a bed in the middle of a party, she cannot achieve the solitude or peace she’s seeking—people keep coming to the door. Strout uses the chatter and fragrance of the party, the niceties and rituals, to put Olive’s thoughts about love and fear in sharp relief.
Olive Kitteridge is among Amanda Craig's top ten elderly heroines in fiction, Elizabeth Lowry's top ten difficult marriages in fiction, Lisa Harding's six top out-of-control characters in literary fiction, Genevieve Plunkett's seven books about the search for intimacy, Emma Duffy-Comparone’s seven darkly humorous titles about relationships, Susie Yang's six titles featuring dark anti-heroines, Sara Collins's six favorite bad women in fiction, Laura Barnett's ten top unconventional love stories, and Sophie Ward's six best books.
--Marshal Zeringue