About the Author

Carol Edgarian is an award-winning novelist, essayist, teacher, and editor. Her novels include Vera, the New York Times bestseller Three Stages of Amazement, and the international bestseller Rise the Euphrates, hailed by The Washington Post as a book "whose generosity of spirit, intelligence, humanity and ambition are what literature ought to be and rarely is today." Rise the Euphrates was awarded the ANC Freedom Prize, and a twentieth-anniversary revised edition of the novel was released to mark the centennial of the Armenian Genocide. Carol's articles and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and W, among many other places, and she coedited The Writer's life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame from the Diaries of the World's Great Writers. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and schools on topics such as "Why Stories Matter," "The Art of Fiction" and publishing today. In 2003 Carol and her husband, Tom Jenks, founded the nonprofit Narrative, a leading digital publisher of fiction, poetry, essays, and art. Dedicated to encouraging reading without paywalls, and to supporting writers by paying them fairly for their work, Narrative publishes hundreds of artists each year and is widely read across generations, in schools, and around the globe. Its entire digital library of thousands of works of literature by celebrated authors and by the best emerging writers is available for free. Born in New Britain, Connecticut, to first-generation American parents, Carol is a graduate of Phillips Andover and Stanford University. After college, while drafting her first novel, she worked as a reporter and freelance writer of speeches, technical manuals, and copy for the high-tech nerds, lawyers, and titans who were inventing Silicon Valley. When Carol left the East Coast for college, she promised her family she'd be back in four years. She has lived in her adopted hometown of San Francisco for more than three decades. She and her husband have three daughters.

Reviews

"This is a book whose generosity of spirit, intelligence, humanity and finally ambition are what literature ought to be and rarely is today - daring, heartbreaking and affirmative, giving order and sense to our random lives." -Washington Post Book World
"Edgarian's sumptuous writing and uncommon wisdom about the human spirit and its maiming seep into a reader's heart, refusing to leave. This is a stunning debut, a book that will doubtless haunt its readers as it beguiles them." -The Miami Herald
"...Vivid, chilling...RISE THE EUPHRATES' richly drawn characters and the haunted voice of the narrator will long remain in readers' memories." -ROBERT STONE
"How often do you get to read a book that captures you so entirely and deeply that it controls your days, measures them out and defines them by how long it will be before you can get to your next night's reading? RISE THE EUPHRATES is on of these rare treasures: a work of power, grace, beauty and exquisite tenderness. This book goes beyond the reading experience; it reminds you of your own hopes and terrors. RISE THE EUPHRATES will live for a long, long time in the manner of Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird." -Rick Bass
"A novel of extraordinary compassion, it's also a dead-on view of assimilation and the American experience." -Phoenix Gazette "The writing is so good it can raise the hairs on your neck." -Elizabeth Berg, Mademoiselle
"To the list of well-wrought generational sagas-John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Alex Haley's Roots, and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club-add [Carol Edgarian's] powerful first novel, RISE THE EUPHRATES." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Few first novels are as deeply felt, yet so clearly communicative, as this one. It touches universals while powerfully evoking the everyday world in which we cope within our families with past, present and future. . . . Edgarian's novel has literary award written on every page." -The San Diego Union-Tribune
"RISE THE EUPHRATES is an important, powerful, poignant novel. . . . Carol Edgarian's prodigious talents as a storyteller, her ability to account what there was and was not for these Armenian Americans, should not be missed." -Don Lee, Ploughshares "
RISE THE EUPHRATES packs an emotional wallop." -Elle
"Where is Armenia today? . . . One could almost say that Armenia persists in Carol Edgarian's prose." -New York Times Book Review
"A beautiful and generous book." -Chicago Tribune "One of the summer's Best Reads!" -Vogue