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Heidi Julavits

Biography

Heidi Julavits

Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels (THE VANISHERS, THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT, THE EFFECT OF LIVING BACKWARDS and THE MINERAL PALACE) and a memoir (DIRECTIONS TO MYSELF). She's also the co-editor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller WOMEN IN CLOTHES. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s and The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She’s a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine.

Heidi Julavits

Books by Heidi Julavits

by Heidi Julavits - Memoir, Nonfiction

One summer, Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls “the end times of childhood.” When did this happen?, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming --- and what qualifies me to be his guide? The next four years feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where Julavits teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability. She begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he’s about to enter. Looking back to her childhood in Maine, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity.

by Heidi Julavits - Essays, Nonfiction

When Heidi Julavits found her old diaries in a storage bin, she hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, "The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor." Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a forty-something woman, wife, mother and writer. The result is THE FOLDED CLOCK, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, art and ambition.

by Heidi Julavits - Fiction

Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.