Housebound

by Elizabeth Gentry

Overview

Elizabeth Gentry’s debut, Housebound, is a novel like no other: a disquieting and interior fairy-tale adventure through one family’s secrets and lies. Maggie, the eldest daughter, is preparing to leave the house in which she’s lived, worked, and been educated her whole life: a life led seemingly without contact with the outside world, save in the form of weekly trips to the library for the stories that are the only escape for Maggie and her eight brothers and sisters. Maggie’s seeming estrangement from the most familiar details of her life give the novel an almost Kafkaesque feel, as if Kafka had been born an Appalachian woman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780982315682
Publisher:	Lake Forest College Press
Publication date:	11/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

ELIZABETH GENTRY received the 2012 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize for Housebound. Originally from Asheville, North Carolina, she lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she works as a writing specialist for the University of Tennessee College of Law and teaches in the university’s English department. She received a MFA in fiction writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Editorial Reviews

Here, secrets crisscross through walls as through hours, and words travel in creepy, kind whispers . . . Grown children run through the woods and enter strange houses. They live over here and over there—all over the terrible and beautiful map.”—Kate Bernheimer, judge for the 2011–12 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize

“Every important novel explores the tension between our inner lives and the outside world, but Elizabeth Gentry’s Housebound does so in a way so profound and unsettling that the reader sometimes feels trapped between the two. Housebound traffics in the liminal, in the recesses of consciousness, in mystery and in manners, yet it appeals to the heart as well as the head . . . Nothing like this dark fairy tale of discovery and desire has yet been written.”—Michael Parker, author of The Watery Part of the World

From the Publisher