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Norah Piehl

Biography

Norah Piehl


Norah Piehl worked for 10 years at the Boston Book Festival, overseeing their day-to-day operations. She is now the Director for Literary Programs at the Bay Area Book Festival. A former children's bookseller, Norah has also worked in the publishing industry for both university and trade publishers. She is an active writer whose essays, interviews and reviews have been published in Publishers WeeklyThe Horn BookBrain, Child, Skirt! magazine, National Public Radio and many other publications, as well as in several print anthologies. Her short fiction has appeared in Literary MamaThe Linnet's WingsThe LegendaryPrinter's Devil Review and the anthology BATTLE RUNES: Writings on War. Norah lives in Berkeley, California.

Norah Piehl

Reviews by Norah Piehl

by Sophie Cousens - Comedy, Fiction, Humor, Romance, Women's Fiction

Stuck in a Production Assistant job and living at home with her parents after a painful breakup, 31-year-old Chloe Fairway isn’t where she wants to be in life. The last thing she needs is to face the people who once voted her "most likely to succeed" at her upcoming 10-year college reunion. And she definitely doesn’t want to see her former best friend, Sean Adler, who is now a hotshot film director living the life Chloe dreamed of. Desperate to make a splash --- and to save face in front of the man who might be the one that got away --- she turns to a mysterious dating service. Enter Rob, her handsome, well-read and charming match, the perfect plus-one to take to her reunion. The more she gets to know him, the more perfect he appears to be. As Chloe reconnects with old friends, she begins to question everything she thought she wanted.

by Anika Jade Levy - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Avery is a grad student in New York working on a collection of cultural reports and flailing financially and emotionally. She dates older men for money, and others for the oblivion their egos offer. In an act of desperation, Avery takes a job at a right-wing dating app. The "white-paper" she is tasked to write for the startup eventually merges with her dissertation, resulting in a metafictional text that reveals itself over the course of the novel. Meanwhile, her best friend, Frances, an effortlessly chic emerging filmmaker from a wealthy Southern family, drops out of grad school, gets married, and somehow still manages to finish her first feature documentary. Frances' triumphant return to New York as the toast of the art world sends Avery into a final tailspin, pushing her to make a series of devastating decisions.

by Sarah Hall - Fiction

Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind --- a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of Northern England since the dawn of time. Through the stories of those who’ve obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm --- and the farmer’s daughter who fiercely loved Helm. But now Dr. Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears that human pollution is killing Helm.

by Souvankham Thammavongsa - Fiction

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. However, beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange. As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities --- as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances --- will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.

by Ilana Masad - Fiction, Historical 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 BEINGS, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads. Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Ilana 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' letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.

by Angela Flournoy - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique and Nakia are in their early 20s and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood --- overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences --- swoops in and stays. As these friends move from the late 2000s into the late 2020s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another --- amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

by Eliana Ramage - Fiction

Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother fled an abusive husband --- with Steph and her younger sister in tow --- to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon. Spanning three decades and several continents, TO THE MOON AND BACK encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her.

by Joan Silber - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In the gritty East Village of 1970s New York, Ivan and his best friend, Eddie, a popular local bartender, are dabbling in drugs following a short tour of Europe. One night, as Ivan and Eddie experiment with heroin, things go horribly wrong. In a panic, Ivan rushes Eddie to a crowded local ER and, believing his friend is about to die, makes the awful choice to leave him there. This one act of abandonment haunts Ivan his entire life. He keeps this secret from his friends and later his family, forever searching for mercy from "a remorse that never dies." Ivan's decision also ripples across time through an extended community, affecting a host of other people unknowingly connected to that night.

by Christina Baker Kline and Anne Burt - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

Two years ago, Hayley Stone lost everything. First, her parents died in a devastating fire. Then, her sister overdosed, leaving Hayley alone and hounded by a media circus that turned her family’s tragedy into tabloid fodder. When her new husband suggests a fresh start in the Adirondacks, the promise of anonymity in an isolated mountain town feels like salvation. But the mountains hold darker secrets than she ever imagined. Her once-loving husband grows distant and volatile. The widow down the road keeps spewing vague accusations. Not even their new friends can help her shake the creeping sense that something is off. As winter edges closer, Hayley discovers that her sanctuary is anything but safe. In trying to escape her past, she may have run straight into something far more dangerous.

by Brian Buckbee with Carol Ann Fitzgerald - Memoir, Nonfiction

On a spring evening in Montana, Brian Buckbee encounters an injured baby pigeon. Heartbroken after the loss of the love of his life and increasingly isolated by a mysterious illness that overtook him while trekking through Asia, Brian is unaware that this bird --- who he names Two-Step --- will change his life. Brian takes in Two-Step and more injured birds, eventually transforming his home into a madcap bird rehabilitation and rescue center. As Brian and Two-Step grow closer, an unexpected kinship forms. But their paths won’t converge forever. As Two-Step heals and finds love, Brian’s condition worsens, and with his friend’s release back into the world looming closer, Brian must decide where this story leaves him.