Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel, Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City.
“Remarkable . . . [The Interestings’s] inclusive vision and
generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan
Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot. The
Interestings is warm, all-American, and acutely perceptive about
the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female,
young and old, gay and straight; but it’s also stealthily,
unassumingly, and undeniably a novel of ideas. . . . With this book
[Wolitzer] has surpassed herself.”—The New York Times Book
Review
"A victory . . . The Interestings secures Wolitzer's place among
the best novelists of her generation. . . . She's every bit as
literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her
work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn't women's fiction.
It's everyone's."—Entertainment Weekly (A)
"The big questions asked by The Interestings are about what
happened to the world (when, Jules wonders, did 'analyst' stop
denoting Freud and start referring to finance?) and what happened
to all that budding teenage talent. Might every privileged
schoolchild have a bright future in dance or theater or glass
blowing? Ms. Wolitzer hasn’t got the answers, but she does have her
characters mannerisms and attitudes down cold."—The New York
Times
"I don't want to insult Meg Wolitzer by calling her sprawling,
engrossing new novel, The Interestings, her most ambitious, because
throughout her 30-year career of turning out well-observed, often
very funny books at a steady pace, I have no doubt she has always
been ambitious. . . . But "The Interestings" is exactly the kind of
book that literary sorts who talk about ambitious works . . . are
talking about. . . . Wolitzer is almost crushingly insightful; she
doesn't just mine the contemporary mind, she seems to invade
it."—San Francisco Chronicle
"A sprawling, marvelously inventive novel . . . ambitious
and enormously entertaining."—The Washington Post
"A supremely engrossing, deeply knowing, genius-level enterprise .
. . The novel is thick and thickly populated. And yet Wolitzer is
brilliant at keeping the reader close by her side as she takes her
story back and forth across time, in and out of multiple lives, and
into the tangle of countless continuing, sometimes compromising,
conversations."—Chicago Tribune
“Masterful, sweeping . . . Her clear gaze captures the intricacies
of lasting friendship, enduring love, marital sacrifice, bitter
squabbles, family secrets, parental angst and deep loss. Though the
story hops back and forth in time, it is rarely confusing,
frequently funny and always engaging. . . . A story that feels
real and true and more than fulfills the promise of the title. It
is interesting, yes, but also moving, compelling, fascinating, and
rewarding.”—Miami Herald
“Wolitzer has produced a novel that is big by at least a couple of
clear measures—it’s nearly 500 pages long, and it covers a lot of
time and drama in the lives of a small circle of friends. . . .
It’s a small world in which these characters want to live large,
and Wolitzer is wonderful at conveying that through the point of
view of someone who doesn’t even see it, all the while shading in
the stuff that lives, big and small, are made of.”—Minneapolis Star
Tribune
“It’s a ritual of childhood—that solemn vow never to lose touch, no
matter what. And for six artsy teenagers whose lives unfold in
Wolitzer’s big-hearted, ambitious new novel, the vow holds for
almost four decades.”—People
"Readers may also enjoy comparing The Interestings with Claire
Messud's The Emperor's Children . . . In probing the
unpredictable relationship between early promise and success and
the more dependable one between self-acceptance and happiness,
Wolitzer's novel is not just a big book but a shrewd
one."—Christian Science Monitor
"[The Interestings] soars, primarily because Wolitzer insists on
taking our teenage selves seriously and, rather than coldly
satirizing them, comes at them with warm humor and adult
wisdom."—Elle
"In Meg Wolitzer's lovely, wise The Interestings, Julie Jacobson
begins the summer of '74 as an outsider at arts camp until she is
accepted into a clique of teenagers with whom she forms a lifelong
bond. Through well-tuned drama and compassionate humor, Wolitzer
chronicles the living organism that is friendship, and arcs it over
the cours of more than thirty years."—O, the Oprah Magazine
"Wonderful."—Vanity Fair
"Juicy, perceptive and vividly written."—NPR.org
"A sprawling, ambitious and often wistful novel."—USA Today
"What becomes a legend most? or rather, who? Those with innate
ability? Those blessed with enough beauty or money to indulge any
creative whim? Or just those who want it the most? In The
Interestings, Meg Wolitzer's quarry is ambition: what it means to
have it, how to use it, how it's lost."—Time
"Best-selling novelist Meg Wolitzer specializes in witty, knowing
takes on contemporary marriage, divorce, and relationships. Her
ninth novel, The Interestings, is smart, nuanced, and fun to read,
in part because of the effervescent evocation of New York City from
Watergate to today, in part because of the idiosyncratic
authenticity of her characters."—The Daily Beast
"You’ll want to be friends with these characters long after you put
down the book.”—Marie Claire
"A page-turner."—Cosmopolitan
“[A] big, juicy novel . . . Wolitzer’s finger is unerringly on the
pulse of our social culture."—Readers Digest
"Meg Wolitzer kicks off her buzzy tenth novel in 1974 at a summer
camp for artsy kids, where a tight-knit group of campers is
plotting world domination. The result is a Franzen-like treatise on
talent, fate, friendship, and the limits of all three."—V
Magazine
“Breathtaking in its scope and a remarkably fun page-turner . . .
“[Wolitzer's] social commentary on art, money and fame should have
her compared to Tom Wolfe, but her work is much larger than
that.”—Matchbook
“[The Interestings is] so approachable one can almost miss the
excellence and precision of its prose. . . . Ultimately The
Interestings is absorbing and immensely likeable.”—Nylon
"Like Virginia Woolf in The Waves, Meg Wolitzer gives us the full
picture here, charting her characters' lives from the
self-dramatizing of adolescence, through the resignation of middle
age, to the attainment of a wisdom that holds all the intensities
of life in a single, sustained chord, much like this book itself.
The wit, intelligence, and deep feeling of Wolitzer's writing are
extraordinary and The Interestings brings her achievement, already
so steadfast and remarkable, to an even higher level."—Jeffrey
Eugenides
"Wolitzer follows a group of friends from adolescence at an artsy
summer camp in 1974 through adulthood and into late-middle age as
their lives alternately intersect, diverge and reconnect. . . .
Ambitious and involving, capturing the zeitgeist of the liberal
intelligentsia of the era."—Kirkus (starred)
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