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The Lonely Stories book cover
The Lonely Stories
2022
First Published
3.69
Average Rating
276
Number of Pages

A collection of essays about the joys and struggles of being alone by 22 literary writers including: Lev Grossman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lena Dunham, Jesmyn Ward, Yiyun Li, and Anthony Doerr. If you’re feeling lonely or if you’ve ever felt unseen, if you’re emboldened by solitude or secretly longing for it: Welcome to The Lonely Stories. This cathartic collection of personal essays illuminates what the experience of being alone is like for all of us. Some of these stories are heartbreaking, such as Jesmyn Ward’s reckoning with the loss of her husband, Imani Perry’s confrontation with chronic illness, and Dina Nayeri’s reflection on immigrating to a foreign country. Others are witty, such as Lev Grossman’s rueful tale of heading to the woods alone or Anthony Doerr’s struggles with internet addiction. Still others celebrate solitude and the kind of clarity it can bring about, such as Claire Dederer’s journey toward sobriety and Lidia Yuknavitch’s sensual look at women and desire. Thoughtful and ultimately affirming, The Lonely Stories explores emotions that so often go undiscussed, and lets us all know that we’re not alone.

Avg Rating
3.69
Number of Ratings
1,147
5 STARS
21%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
32%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
2%
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Authors

Peter Ho Davies
Peter Ho Davies
Author · 6 books

Peter Ho Davies is a contemporary British writer of Welsh and Chinese descent. He was born and raised in Coventry. Davies studied physics at Manchester University then English at Cambridge University. In 1992 he moved to the United States as a professor of creative writing. He has taught at the University of Oregon and Emory University and is now on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He has published two collections of short fiction, The Ugliest House in the World (1998) and Equal Love (2000). His first novel, The Welsh Girl came out in 2007. Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Natalie Eve Garrett
Natalie Eve Garrett
Author · 2 books
Natalie Eve Garrett is an artist and writer. She's the editor of EAT JOY (Catapult, 2019), a collection of stories exploring how food can help us cope in dark times, and THE ARTISTS' AND WRITERS' COOKBOOK (pH Books, 2016). Her next book is THE LONELY STORIES, forthcoming from Catapult in Spring 2022. A graduate of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design, Natalie lives with her husband and two children in a town just outside DC, along the Potomac River. More information can be found at natalieevegarrett.com.
Maya Shanbhag Lang
Maya Shanbhag Lang
Author · 3 books

Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry: A Memoir, (Random House, April 2020), a New York Times Editor's Pick and one Amazon's Best Books of 2020. She is also the author of The Sixteenth of June (Scribner), long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a Finalist for the Audie Awards for Best Audio Book. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, In Style, and others. Winner the 2017 Neil Shepard Prize in Fiction and the 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation-Bread Loaf Scholarship in Fiction, she was a Finalist for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she lives outside of New York City with her daughter. Visit her website at www.mayalang.com

Jeffery Renard Allen
Jeffery Renard Allen
Author · 8 books

Jeffery Renard Allen is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places (Moyer Bell 2007) and Harbors and Spirits (Moyer Bell 1999), and of the widely celebrated and influential novel, Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), which won The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction. His other awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-first Century Award, a Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, a support grant from Creative Capital, and the 2003 Charles Angoff Award for Fiction from The Literary Review. He has been a fellow at The Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including The Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Bomb, Hambone, The Antioch Review, StoryQuarterly, African Voices, African American Review, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, Other Voices, Black Renaissance Noire, Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, and Homeground: Language for an American Landscape. Born in Chicago, Renard Allen holds a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Besides teaching at Queens College (including, as of fall 2007, in the college’s new MFA program in creative writing), Allen is also an instructor in the graduate writing program at New School University. He has also taught for Cave Canem, the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya, and in the writing program at Columbia University. In addition, he is the director of the Pan African Literary Forum, a writers’ conference in Accra, Ghana, to be held in the summer of 2008. A resident of Far Rockaway, Queens, Allen is presently at work on the novel Song of the Shank, based on the life of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century African American piano virtuoso and composer who performed under the stage name Blind Tom.

Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward
Author · 12 books

Jesmyn Ward is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, and Men We Reaped. She is a former Stegner Fellow (Stanford University) and Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University. Her work has appeared in BOMB, A Public Space and The Oxford American.

Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos
Author · 8 books
Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a best book of 2017. Her third book, Girlhood, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2021. Febos is the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of the 2018 Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, and Anderson Cooper Live; has taught at conferences and colleges nationwide; and has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute, Ucross Foundation, and Ragdale. She is the recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Paris Review, The Sun, The Believer, The Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Vogue, The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
Yiyun Li
Author · 19 books
Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.
Imani Perry
Imani Perry
Author · 10 books

Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton, first appeared in print at age 3 in the Birmingham (Alabama) News in a photo of her and her parents at a protest against police brutality. She has published widely on topics ranging from racial inequality to hip-hop and is active across various media. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a bachelor's degree from Yale University. (from http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/ar...)

Jean Kwok
Jean Kwok
Author · 7 books

Jean Kwok is the award-winning, New York Times and international bestselling author of The Leftover Woman (coming 10/10/23), Girl in Translation, Mambo in Chinatown, and Searching for Sylvie Lee, which was a Read with Jenna Today Show Pick. Her work has been published in twenty countries and is taught in schools across the world. She has been selected for numerous honors, including the American Library Association Alex Award, a Goodreads Choice Awards Semi-Finalist for Mystery & Thriller, the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award, an Orange New Writers title, and the Sunday Times Short Story Award international shortlist. She was one of twelve authors asked by the Agatha Christie estate to write an original, authorized Miss Marple story for the collection Marple: Twelve New Mysteries. She immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She received her bachelor's degree from Harvard University and earned an MFA from Columbia University. She divides her time between the Netherlands and New York City. Learn more about Jean here: www.jeankwok.com https://www.facebook.com/JeanKwokAuthor

Claire Dederer
Claire Dederer
Author · 4 books

Claire’s first book, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January, 2011. It will be published simultaneously in the UK by Bloomsbury. Claire is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Her articles have appeared in Vogue, Real Simple, The Nation, New York, Yoga Journal, on Slate and Salon, and in newspapers across the country. Her writing has encompassed criticism, reporting, and the personal essay. Dederer’s essays have appeared in the anthologies Money Changes Everything (edited by Elissa Schappell and Jenny Offill) and Heavy Rotation (edited by Peter Terzian). Before becoming a freelance journalist, Claire was the chief film critic at Seattle Weekly. With her husband Bruce Barcott, Claire has co-taught writing at the University of Washington. She currently works with private students. A proud fourth-generation Seattle native, Claire lives on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound with her family.

Maile Meloy
Maile Meloy
Author · 12 books
Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review), and the award-winning Apothecary trilogy for young readers. She has received the PEN/Malamud Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. Her new novel for adults, Do Not Become Alarmed, will be published June 6, 2017.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri
Author · 19 books

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age. Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and later received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998). In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005. Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis. She received the following awards, among others: 1999 - PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for Interpreter of Maladies; 2000 - The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for Interpreter of Maladies; 2000 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut Interpreter of Maladies

Amy Shearn
Amy Shearn
Author · 6 books
Amy Shearn is the author of the novels How Far Is the Ocean from Here, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and Unseen City.
Maggie Shipstead
Maggie Shipstead
Author · 6 books

Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. A third novel, Great Circle, will be published in May 2021. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in many places, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Departures, Condé Nast Traveler, Outside, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Sports Writing. In 2012 and 2018, she was a National Magazine Award finalist for fiction. She lives in Los Angeles.

Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr
Author · 11 books

Anthony Doerr is the author of six books, The Shell Collector , About Grace , Memory Wall , Four Seasons in Rome , All the Light We Cannot See , and Cloud Cuckoo Land . Doerr is a two-time National Book Award finalist, and his fiction has won five O. Henry Prizes and won a number of prizes including the Pulitzer Prize and the Carnegie Medal. Become a fan on Facebook and stay up-to-date on his latest publications.

Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch
Author · 13 books

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, and the novel Dora: A Headcase, Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her nonfiction book based on her TED Talk, The Misfit's Manifesto, is forthcoming from TED Books. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.

Dina Nayeri
Dina Nayeri
Author · 6 books
Dina Nayeri is a graduate of Princeton, Harvard Business School, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. She spends her time in New York and Iowa City.
Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau
Author · 5 books
Emily Raboteau is an avid world traveler and professor at City College, in Harlem. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Victor LaValle, and their children. Her stories and essays have been widely published and anthologized in places such as The New Yorker, The Believer, The Guardian, The Oxford American, Guernica, McSweeney's, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American Short Stories. Raboteau's awards include a Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award. She is at work completing her second novel, Endurance, about a New York City building superintendent and his son with autism.
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