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Kathleen Alcott

Biography

Kathleen Alcott

Kathleen Alcott is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, including INFINITE HOME. Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, her short fiction has also been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of 2019 and the Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories of 2023. She has taught at Columbia University and Bennington College, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine and elsewhere.

Kathleen Alcott

Books by Kathleen Alcott

by Kathleen Alcott - Fiction, Short Stories

A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something’s lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter’s former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager. In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life --- as well as the guilt that stalks those who survive them.

by Kathleen Alcott - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Ecuador, 1969: An American expatriate, Fay Fern, sits in the corner of a restaurant. She and her young son, Wright, turned away from the television where Vincent Kahn becomes the first man to walk on the moon. Years earlier, Fay and Vincent meet at a pilots’ bar in the Mojave Desert. Their casual affair ends quickly, but its consequences linger. Though their lives split, their senses of purpose deepen in tandem, each becoming heroes to different sides of the political spectrum of the 1960s and ’70s. With her last public appearance, a demonstration that frames the Apollo program as a vehicle for distracting the American public from its country’s atrocities, Fay leaves Wright to contend with her legacy, his own growing apathy, and the misdeeds of both his mother and his country.

by Kathleen Alcott - Fiction

Edith is a widowed landlady who rents apartments in her Brooklyn brownstone to an unlikely collection of humans, all deeply in need of shelter. Crippled in various ways --- in spirit, in mind, in body, in heart --- the renters struggle to navigate daily existence. They come to realize that Edith’s deteriorating mind, and the menacing presence of her estranged, unscrupulous son, Owen, is the greatest challenge they must confront together.

by Kathleen Alcott - Fiction

Ida, yearning to fill a void in her life from growing up in a single-parent household, forms a familial-like bond with her neighbors, two brothers named Jackson and James. Fissures form in the trio when Ida and Jackson start to fall for one another, discovering the dangers of love in the process.