Laura Warrell
“It can be excruciating to live with uncertainty and, by creating stories, we can make sense of the nonsensical. We can decide how to act. We can move forward.”
Laura Warrell
(c) Rachael Warecki
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“In an exceptional debut, Warrell turns love, or at least the love life of musician Circus Palmer into the proverbial jazz club: dark and sexy, freeing and frightening, ecstatic and lonely. This story is an example of how love, in all of its polyrhythms, can sometimes sound like song, and other times like noise. And this book is an example of how a great story can become a bass drum, kicking and thumping in your belly far after it’s over. A modern masterpiece.”
“Soulful . . . Structured like a jam session, the novel favors a series of riffs over any one
melodic theme. Warrell gives a supporting cast of women their own solos, through close-third-person chapters that detail their entanglements with the elusive Circus . . . Elegant, unexpected and wrenching as the “fierce” sounds that emerge from Circus’s trumpet . . . Unforgettable.”
“Warrell displays delicately wrought characterization and a formidable command of physical and emotional detail. Her more intimate set pieces deliver sensual, erotic vibrations, and, most crucially for a novel that takes its title from Jelly Roll Morton, she knows how to write about the way it feels to deliver jazz—and receive it”
Laura Warrell is the author of the novel Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (Pantheon Books, 2022) a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Golden Poppy Book Award through the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. Named a ‘best’ or ‘must-read’ book by Vanity Fair, People, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Apple Books, The Root, The Millions, Hollywood Reporter, Bustle, Today, Debutiful, and elsewhere, the novel was also chosen as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and an Indie Next List Pick.
Named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly, Laura’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Writer, and other publications. She has attended residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop where she taught in the online Winter Workshop in 2023. She has taught Creative Writing and Literature through the Emerging Voices program at PEN America Los Angeles, at Writing Workshops Los Angeles, and at the Berklee College of Music and other academic institutions in Los Angeles and Boston.
She published Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, her first novel, at 51. In an interview with The Bookseller, she was asked if she was fulfilling a life-long dream. “Yes,” she replied.” To anyone chasing a dream who feels they should give up—don’t do it! I started writing stories as soon as I learned to spell and finished my first novel in college. It didn’t go anywhere. I wrote another, then another. I went back to school to hone my craft. This is my fifth book and my first to get published. It took two years and 50 agents to finally get it into the world. I will be another whose gravestone will read, “She persisted,” but all the hard work has been so worth it.”
Laura grew up in Ohio and graduated from the Creative Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
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