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Ilana Masad

Biography

Ilana Masad

Ilana Masad is a queer Israeli-American fiction writer, essayist and book critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, the Paris Review, NPR, Buzzfeed, Catapult, StoryQuarterly and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as several others. She is the founder and host of The Other Stories podcast and a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she also serves as the Assistant Nonfiction Editor for Prairie Schooner. ALL MY MOTHER'S LOVERS is her debut novel.

Ilana Masad

Books by Ilana Masad

Beings
by Ilana Masad - Fiction, Gay & Lesbian, Literary Fiction, Science Fiction

In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. In Ilana Masad's BEINGS, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads: Masad explores the pair's trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness and alienation in the repressive 1960s. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis's letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.

All My Mother's Lovers
by Ilana Masad - Fiction

After Maggie Krause’s mother, Iris, dies suddenly in a car crash, Maggie finds five sealed envelopes with her will, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of. Overwhelmed by her grief and frustrated with her family, she decides to hand-deliver the letters. The ensuing road trip takes her over miles of California highways, through strangers’ recollections of a second, hidden life, and a journey through her own fears as she navigates her new relationship. As she fills in the details of Iris’ story, Maggie must confront the possibility that almost everything she knew about her --- her marriage, her lukewarm relationship to Judaism, her disapproval of her daughter’s queerness --- is more meaningful than she ever allowed herself to imagine.