Kirstin Valdez Quade
“What fuels my fiction is uncertainty, and not understanding things. I’m writing into uncertainty. That’s where the energy comes from.”
Kirstin Valdez Quade
(c) Holly Andres
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“An unputdownable novel, The Five Wounds takes my breath away with its intimate, humorous, and heart-aching portrayal of a New Mexican family. Kirstin Valdez Quade can make a reader laugh and break a reader’s heart in the same breath, and she leaves us, by the end of the novel, in awe of the dazzling power of her storytelling.”
“The characters in this engrossing novel are created in luminous and memorable detail. Just as the pacing is perfect, so too are the tact and care with which each scene is made. Kirstin Valdez Quade, by concentrating on the truth of small moments, has brought a whole world into focus.”
“Quade’s ability to depict an entire world within the limitations of a single story is reminiscent of Alice Munro… the final story …is an emotional tour de force.”
“Remarkable… In almost every story, Quade goes for vivid spectacle and theatrical plot twists… But Quade focuses just as intensely on the subtler customs, cruelties, kindnesses, and skewed alliances of precarious family life… If Quade ever yearned to escape her archaic Catholic heritage and redefine herself, let’s be glad she didn’t. Her vision has thrived on its fierce, flesh-conscious desire for transcendence.”
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds (W.W. Norton & Co., 2021), winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award. Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Kirstin is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
When asked about the role faith plays in her fiction, she responded: “I think one of the reasons I'm interested in faith is that faith is so much about longing. It's about longing for transcendence, it's longing to be closer to the infinite and longing to connect with others; it's about empathy. And I think that's also the project of fiction. Fiction is about longing and empathy.”
Kirstin earned her B.A. from Stanford University and her M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Oregon. Originally from New Mexico, she now lives in New Jersey and is an associate professor at Princeton University.
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The Five Wounds
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Night at the Fiestas
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