Jami Attenberg Popular Books
Jami Attenberg Biography & Facts
Jami Attenberg (born 1971) is an American fiction writer and essayist. She is the author of a short story collection, six novels, including the best-seller The Middlesteins (2012), and a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You (2022). Early life Attenberg was born in 1971 in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The daughter of a travelling salesman, she grew up in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1993. Career Attenberg worked at HBO (2000 to 2003) before deciding to devote herself to fiction writing, initially supported by temp jobs. Attenberg has also worked at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a job she took after giving several readings at the store. Fiction In 2006, Attenberg published a collection of short stories with Random/Shaye Areheart under the title Instant Love. Two novels followed: The Kept Man (Riverhead, 2008) and The Melting Season (2010). Following a change in publisher and accompanying marketing strategy (with subsequent works promoted not as women's fiction but instead as literary fiction, including a blurb from Jonathan Franzen on her third book), Attenberg experienced a literary breakthrough in 2012 with her third novel The Middlesteins, which became a New York Times bestseller and was listed among the ten best-selling books on Amazon in 2012. The book describes "a suburban Jewish family, and how it reacts to the disaster unfolding in its midst," Julie Orringer wrote in a New York Times review, with different chapters narrated from different characters' point of view. The Middlesteins was translated into multiple languages and Attenberg was nominated for multiple literature awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. In 2015, Attenberg published her fifth book, Saint Mazie (Hachette). Saint Mazie is a historical novel based on Mazie Gordon-Phillips, who lived in New York in the Jazz Age; the novel is written as her fictional diary discovered by a documentary filmmaker researching her life. Buzzfeed listed Saint Mazie as one of the 27 "Most Exciting Books of 2015." Attenberg's next novel, All Grown Up, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US in March 2017, and in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Holland in 2017–2018. All Grown Up tells the story of 39-year-old Andrea Bern, who is single and living in New York as her family cares for her terminally ill niece in New Hampshire. In The New York Times, Helen Schulman notes that like The Middlesteins, All Grown Up "is in part about choosing to save yourself even if that means letting down someone who really needs you." In October 2019, she published All This Could Be Yours. It was selected as a "Publishers Weekly Pick" with a starred review. Non-fiction Attenberg's essays have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Elle and Lenny Letter. In January 2022, she published a memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You; in a review in The New York Times, Claire Dederer said the book reflected Attenberg's "gifts as a novelist: a fierce impulse toward honesty, a companionably cranky voice and an interest in the complicated, bobbing and weaving ways in which people navigate their desires." Personal life Attenberg lives in New Orleans, LA. Bibliography Short-story collection Instant Love: Fiction. Shaye Areheart Books. 2006. ISBN 978-0-307-33782-5. Novels The Kept Man. Riverhead Books. 2007. ISBN 978-1-101-21801-3. The Melting Season. Riverhead Books. 2010. ISBN 978-1-59448-896-2. The Middlesteins. Grand Central Publishing. 2012. ISBN 978-1-4555-0719-1. Saint Mazie. Grand Central Publishing. 2015. ISBN 978-1-4555-9988-2. All Grown Up. HarperCollins. 2017. ISBN 978-0-544-82426-3. All This Could Be Yours. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2019. ISBN 978-0-544-82425-6. Memoirs I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. HarperCollins. 2022. ISBN 978-0-06-303981-0. References External links Official website. Discover the Jami Attenberg popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jami Attenberg books.
Best Seller Jami Attenberg Books of 2024
-
Mostly Dead Things
Kristen ArnettThe celebrated New York Times BestsellerA Best Book of the Year pick at the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, TIME, Washington Post, Oprahmag....
-
Scratch
Manjula MartinA collection of essays from today’s most acclaimed authorsfrom Cheryl Strayed to Roxane Gay to Jennifer Weiner, Alexander Chee, Nick Hornby, and Jonathan Franzenon the realities of...
-
A Reason to See You Again
Jami AttenbergFrom New York Times bestselling author Jami Attenberg comes a dazzling novel of family, following a troubled mother and her two daughters over forty years and through a s...
-
Goldberg Variations
Susan IsaacsFrom New York Times bestselling author Susan Issacs, a “deliciously wicked” (Publishers Weekly) story of three cousins and a fortune.Imagine King Lear as a comedy…At seventynine, G...
-
Music Love Drugs War
Geraldine Quigley'A clever multiplenarrative account of teenage kicks and sectarian strife in early 80s Northern Ireland . . . this debut marks out Quigley as a writer of compassion and humour' Gua...
-
Good Eggs
Rebecca HardimanNamed a Best FeelGood Book by The Washington PostWhen a home aide arrives to assist a rambunctious family at a crossroads, simmering tensions boil over in this “witty, exuberant de...
-
How Not to Drown
Jaimee WristonFrom WILLA Literary Awardwinning author Jaimee Wriston comes a novel for fans of Jami Attenberg and Elizabeth Strout about a former model whose undisciplined granddaughter turns he...
-
The Nakeds
Lisa GlattA hitandrun accident sends the lives of both driver and victim into unforeseen trajectories in a family drama set against the backdrop of the sexual revolution and 1970s California...
-
George and Lizzie
Nancy PearlFrom “America’s librarian” and NPR books commentator Nancy Pearl comes an emotional, “AnneTyleresque” (Library Journal) debut novel about an unlikely marriage at a crossroads.Georg...