Love Invents Us (22 page)

Amy Bloom is the author of the bestselling and acclaimed novel
Away
;
Come to Me
, a National Book Award finalist;
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award;
Love Invents Us
; and
Normal
. Her stories have appeared in
The Best American Short Stories
,
O. Henry Prize Stories
,
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
, and many other anthologies here and abroad. She has written for
The New Yorker
,
The New York Times Magazine
,
The Atlantic Monthly
,
Vogue
,
Granta
, and
Slate
, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Bloom is the Kim-Frank Family University Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University.

A BLIND MAN CAN SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU

In Amy Bloom’s brilliant short story collection, lives are illuminated in the midst of darkness, of thwarted and unexpected love, of families made and found. These are people we know and are, people we long to be and fear we may become: a mother grieves for her beloved daughter and the handsome young man surgery will make her; a woman with breast cancer, a frightened husband, and a best friend all discover that their lifelong triangle is not what any of them imagined; a couple survives the death of their newborn to find themselves in mortal combat with the world. Sensuous, heartbreaking, spare, and laugh-out-loud funny, these tales take us straight to the unpredictable heart of real life, with rare generosity and wit.

Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-375-70557-1

LOVE INVENTS US

National Book Award finalist Amy Bloom has written a tale of growing up that is sharp and funny, rueful and uncompromisingly real. A girl with smudged pink harlequin glasses and a habit of stealing Heath bars from the local five-and-dime, Elizabeth Taube is the only child of parents whose indifference to her is the one sure thing in her life. When her search for love and attention leads her into the arms of her junior high school English teacher, things begin to get complicated. In this exquisitely rendered novel, Elizabeth, Horace, and Max know each other, leave each other, and find each other again over the course of thirty years. The need to be loved and the unreasonable demands of the heart take Bloom’s characters through lives they could not have even imagined. With her finely honed style and her generous, unflinching sensibility, Bloom shows how profoundly the forces of love and desire can shape a life.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-75022-9

NORMAL

Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence. The same qualities distinguish
Normal
, a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of “people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic”—female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, “Melanie,” who devote themselves to the cause of “ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension.” And we meet Hale Hawbecker, “a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy” with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender, and identity, Bloom reveals new facets to the ideas of happiness, personality, and character, even as she brilliantly illuminates the very concept of “normal.”

Gender Studies/978-1-4000-3244-0

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