Jamie Quatro
“Just give me the truth, you know? The truth of the world as it is, not as I want it to be, or think it should be. The intoxicating allure of illicit sexual pleasure. The darkness of existential despair. I don’t care what the personal views of the truth-teller are.”
“It would be difficult to overstate the wonder I felt while reading this novel. It’s among the most beautiful books I’ve ever read about longing―for beauty, for sex, for God, for a coherent life.”
“There are books with front doors, through which the reader walks right in, and there are books with side doors. Side door books take more interpretive work, but yield special pleasures. Jamie Quatro’s fantastic new novel, Fire Sermon, is a side door book. The novel delivers its story through a variety of methods: first-person confessions, “fictional” third-person descriptions, letters sent and unsent, emails, questionnaires, Socratic dialogues with the self. Roiling, raw and sensual on the surface, this mazy novel rewards a second reading... The sentences burn with desire and disquiet. The novel is generously condensed, ardently focused, its mechanisms poetic, not expository. In fact, although it is fiction, Fire Sermon reminds me most of confessional poetry, the aim of which is uncompromising honesty and self-exposure. .. You may enter this book through an interest in poetry or theology, but once you are there, it shows you more”
“Fasten your seat belt: Jamie Quatro is a writer of great talent who knows how to take a dark turn without ever tapping the brakes and then bring you back into daylight with breathtaking precision. These amazing stories explore the human boundaries between the physical world and the spiritual—lust, betrayal, and loss in perfect balance with love, redemption, and grace.”
Jamie Quatro is the author of the debut novel, Fire Sermon (Grove Press, 2018) and the short story collection, I Want To Show You More (Grove Press, 2013). Fire Sermon was selected as one of the Top Seven Novels of 2018 by The Economist, and named a Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Times Literary Supplement. It is also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book, Indie Next pick, and New York Times Editors' Choice. Quatro's debut story collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, an NPR Best Book of 2013, and was chosen as a favorite book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker. The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. Her next novel is Two-Step Devil, coming from Grove Press in September, 2024.
A contributing editor at Oxford American, Quatro’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her stories are anthologized in the O.Henry Prize Stories 2013, The Story and Its Writer, and the 2018 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
In a conversation with Lily King in Barnes + Noble Review, Quatro was asked about writing sex scenes: “Drafting them actually felt highly technical. How do I say just enough to communicate what’s happening, but no more? Too much detail will drive readers away; not enough will make them scratch their heads. This is always my struggle writing about physical intimacy. You can’t use the vocabulary, and the sex has to be about something other than the sex. You have to say it without saying it.”
She holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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