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Mona Simpson

Biography

Mona Simpson

Mona Simpson is the bestselling author of ANYWHERE BUT HERE, THE LOST FATHER, A REGULAR GUY, OFF KECK ROAD, MY HOLLYWOOD, CASEBOOK and COMMITMENT. OFF KECK ROAD was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is on the faculty at UCLA and also teaches at Bard College. In 2020, she was named publisher of The Paris Review. She lives in Santa Monica, California.

Mona Simpson

Books by Mona Simpson

by Mona Simpson - Fiction

When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who maintains a wishful belief that her children can attain all the things she hasn’t, she’s worked hard to secure their future in caste-driven 1980s Los Angeles, gaining them illegal entry to an affluent public school. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their mother’s dreams for them alive. Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know firsthand in their own families or in those of their neighbors.

by Mona Simpson - Fiction

From the acclaimed and award-winning author of ANYWHERE BUT HERE and MY HOLLYWOOD comes a powerful new novel about a young boy’s quest to uncover the mysteries of his unraveling family. What he discovers turns out to be what he least wants to know: the inner workings of his parents’ lives. And even then he can’t stop searching.

by Mona Simpson

Lola, a Filipino mother of five, takes a job as a nanny in America to pay for her daughter’s education, bringing some stability to a rocky Hollywood household.