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Marisa Silver

Biography

Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver is the author of the novels THE MYSTERIES; LITTLE NOTHING; MARY COIN, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award; THE GOD OF WAR, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; and NO DIRECTION HOME.

Her first collection of short stories, BABE IN PARADISE, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, ALONE WITH YOU, was published, The New York Times called her “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers.” Her fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.

She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and writers. She lives in Los Angeles. AT LAST is her most recent novel.

Marisa Silver

Books by Marisa Silver

At Last
by Marisa Silver - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner are two formidable women whose paths cross when their children marry. Both women are sharp, cunning and unwavering in their conflicting beliefs about marriage, responsibility and family and, most pressingly, their efforts to vie for the love of their shared granddaughter. AT LAST paints a vivid portrait of the American Midwest, capturing the essence of a time and place where societal norms and personal aspirations often clashed. Marisa Silver’s narrative weaves together the lives of Helene and Evelyn, from their vastly different childhoods through the pivotal events that define them.

The Mysteries
by Marisa Silver - Fiction

Miggy Brenneman is a wild and reckless seven-year-old with a fierce imagination, hellbent on pushing against the limits of childhood. Ellen is polite, cautious and drawn to her friend's bright flame. While the adults around them adjust to unstable times and fractured relationships, the girls respond with increasingly dangerous play. When tragedy strikes, all the novel's characters grapple with questions of fate and individual responsibility --- none more so than Miggy, who must make sense of a swiftly disappearing past and a radically transformed future.

Little Nothing
by Marisa Silver - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In an unnamed country at the beginning of the last century, a child called Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival, conceived in part by gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, stuns her parents and brings outrage and scorn from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf, but as the years pass, she grows no farther than the edge of her crib. When her parents turn to the treatments of a local charlatan, his terrifying cure opens the floodgates of persecution for Pavla. LITTLE NOTHING unfolds across a lifetime of unimaginable, magical transformation in and out of human form, as an outcast girl becomes a hunted woman whose ultimate survival depends on the most startling transfiguration of them all.

Mary Coin
by Marisa Silver - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of a road in Central California is spontaneously photographed by a woman documenting the migrant laborers who have taken to America’s farms in search of work. Little personal information is exchanged, and neither woman has any way of knowing that they have produced what will become the most iconic image of the Great Depression.