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Maggie Shipstead

Biography

Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels GREAT CIRCLE, ASTONISH ME and SEATING ARRANGEMENTS, and the short story collection YOU HAVE A FRIEND IN 10A. She is the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Los Angeles.

Maggie Shipstead

Books by Maggie Shipstead

by Maggie Shipstead - Fiction, Short Stories

From the Booker Prize nominee and New York Times bestselling author of GREAT CIRCLE comes a piercing, irresistible first collection of short stories exquisite in their craft and audacious in their range. A love triangle plays out over decades on a Montana dude ranch. A hurdler and a gymnast spend a single night together in the Olympic village. Mistakes and mysteries weave an intangible web around an old man’s deathbed in Paris, connecting disparate destinies. On the slopes of an unfinished ski resort, a young woman searches for her vanished lover. A couple’s Romanian honeymoon goes ominously awry, and, in the mesmerizing title story, a former child actress breaks with her life in a Hollywood cult.

by Maggie Shipstead - Fiction, Historical Fiction

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There, Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At 14, she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates collide.

by Maggie Shipstead - Fiction

Joan Joyce is a young ballerina whose claim to fame is her role in helping a Nureyev-like dancer defect from the Soviet Union. Ultimately she chooses family over fouettés but, in a bittersweet, Turning Point-style twist, sees her son accede to the stellar career she never had.

by Maggie Shipstead - Fiction

The Van Meters have gathered at their family retreat on the island of Waskeke to celebrate the marriage of daughter Daphne to the impeccably appropriate Greyson Duff. The weekend is full of champagne, salt air and practiced bonhomie, but long-buried discontent and simmering lust stir beneath the surface. When old resentments, a beached whale and an escaped lobster are added to the mix, the wedding that should have gone off with military precision threatens to become a spectacle of misbehavior.