Maxine Swann - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Life

Swann grew up on a farm in southern Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

, before attending Phillips Academy

Phillips Academy

Phillips Academy is a selective, co-educational independent boarding high school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate year...

and then Columbia College

Columbia College of Columbia University

Columbia College is the oldest undergraduate college at Columbia University, situated on the university's main campus in Morningside Heights in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1754 by the Church of England as King's College, receiving a Royal Charter from King George II...

, where she studied Comparative Literature (French and German) and creative writing with Mary Gordon, graduating in 1994.

She pursued her graduate studies at the Sorbonne

Sorbonne

The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...

, Université de Paris VII

University of Paris VII: Denis Diderot

Paris Diderot University, also known as Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7, is a French leading University located in Paris, France. It is one of the heirs of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris , which was one of the earliest established in Europe, founded in the mid 12th century...

, earning her master's degree

Master's degree

A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

in 1997 with a thesis

Thesis

A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...

on the style of Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

. She now lives in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

, Argentina.

Insights into her 2001 move to Argentina, divorce and life as an ex-pat writer were the subject of a "At Home Abroad" column of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

on June 19, 2008.

Work

Swann's work first appeared in Ploughshares
Ploughshares
Ploughshares is an American literary magazine founded in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, Ploughshares has been based at Emerson College in the heart of Boston...

, in an issue guest-edited by Mary Gordon, and she won a Cohen Award for that short story, "Flower Children", in 1997. The same story won her an O. Henry Award

O. Henry Award

The O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....

, the Pushcart Prize

Pushcart Prize

The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are invited to nominate up to 6 works they have featured....

and selection by The Best American Short Stories
Best American Short Stories
The Best American Short Stories yearly anthology is a part of The Best American Series published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since 1915, the BASS anthology has striven to contain the best short stories by some of the best-known writers in contemporary American literature.-Edward O'Brien:The...

.

At the time, Ploughshares quoted her: "All stories, I think, are in the end a very dense mixture of memory and imagination, with the doses varying each time. ‘Flower Children,’ I see now, was a story I’d been trying to write since I’d begun writing. It is, in a sense, a condensation of nearly all the stories, pages, and even poems that I wrote in grade school, high school, and then college. In her writing class at Columbia, Mary Gordon, taking my efforts seriously, pressed me further towards it, also introducing me to the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann was an Austrian poet and author.-Biography:Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, in the Austrian state of Carinthia, the daughter of a headmaster. She studied philosophy, psychology, German philology, and law at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna...

, whose work eventually led me to find the form in which to say what I wanted to say."

Her first novel, Serious Girls, was published by Picador

Picador (imprint)

Picador is an imprint of Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom and Australia and of Macmillan Publishing in the United States. Both companies are owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group....

in 2003 and focused on the coming of age

Coming of age

Coming of age is a young person's transition from childhood to adulthood. The age at which this transition takes place varies in society, as does the nature of the transition. It can be a simple legal convention or can be part of a ritual, as practiced by many societies...

of two boarding school

Boarding school

A boarding school is a school where some or all pupils study and live during the school year with their fellow students and possibly teachers and/or administrators. The word 'boarding' is used in the sense of "bed and board," i.e., lodging and meals...

girls, Maya and Roe. Swann's second novel, Flower Children, appeared in May 2007, published by Riverhead Books

Riverhead Books

Riverhead Books is a division of Penguin Group .Notable books and major bestsellers published by Riverhead include Journals by Kurt Cobain; The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama; The Color of Water by James McBride; Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft by Chang-rae Lee; Fever...

and won the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from The Academy of Arts and Letters honoring “recent writing in book form that merits recognition for the quality of its prose style.” Her third book, The Foreigners [August 2011, Riverhead], which traces the lives of four foreigners living in Buenos Aires, was called "a fearless novel," by Joseph O'Neill (author of "Netherland"), "beautifully written, sensual, seductive," by Kirkus Review and "atmospheric, evocative literary fiction that ruminates on what it means and how it feels to be foreign" by Booklist.

Swann has taught creative writing at Barnard College and also works as a private writing coach.

Flower Children

Flower Children is a series of linked short stories written by Swann over the course of a decade, published ten years before in Ploughshares. The stories are written from different points of view; the first chapter follows a collective, fused third person, i.e. the "they" of the children growing up; others are told in the first person by Maeve, whom, given the parallels between Swann's fiction and her life, the reader may assume to be her proxy.

The book was praised by Michiko Kakutani in "The New York Times" as "a gem of a novel, a novel that showcases [Swann's] eye for detail, her psychological acuity, her ability to conjure up a particular place and time," and summarized in the "Newly Released" column of The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, where Amy Virshup wrote, "In this slim volume she returns to the story, about four young children being raised by their hippie parents on a farm in rural Pennsylvania (which tracks closely Ms. Swann's own childhood). The eight chapters take the children from the paradise of their early childhood ... to young adulthood when they return to the farm as visitors."

The tone of the short stories varies, interfering, as one reviewer has noted, with the coherence of the work.

External links

Ploughshares

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