This one, I plan to fight for...

CHRISTINE SCHUTT

Christine Schutt is a novelist and short story writer who received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then, later, her MFA from Colombia University. Currently, Schutt lives in New York City where she is an English teacher at the Nightengale-Bamford School, an all girl prep-school. I suppose I find this so interesting because most of us only get to study under our writing idols once we've already labored through High School and most of college, but not these girls, OH NO, they get it that luxury even before they get their lisences. 

Schutt is also the senior editor of the annual literary periodical published by Diane Williams, NOON.

Her published works include:

Nightwork (1996)

Florida (2004)

A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (2005)

All Souls (2008)

Schutt is a Pushcart and O'Henry Prize winning author and was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction, and Nightwork, a collection of  short stories was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement. Her writing is raw, inviting and familiar, the kind of writing where you want to look away because it has gotten to you from within, but when you try to put it down, you simply cannot. You just won't.

"Another boy, another car, she used to let him feel her up just so long as she could sleep. 'The night shift,' she said to her father, 'is such a bitch. You're always tired. I can't talk,' she said, and she kissed her father. She opened her mouth to him and worried her hand inside his coat and felt the warm damp of his shirt, the hard back and heat of her father." ~You Drive

REVIEWS:

"In the opening piece, 'You Drive,' a grown daughter and her father cross the boundaries of any usual parent-child relationship as they sit in a car, sharing secrets, kissing and memorizing the smell and texture of one another's skin."

~Kirkus Reviews

"Shor through with [Virginia] Woolf's lyrical, restless spirit...A bold, sharp story about teenage girls, class and illness, about those moments when we achieve the miracle of human condition--and those when we don't."

~Maud Casey, New York Times Book Review

"Schutt's writing is sharp as ever, with a keen eye for life's everyday grotesqueries...Schutt continues to capture the messiness and confusions particular to adolescence, but in All Souls, new terrain refreshes this writer's astringent voice."

~Christopher Schmidt, Time Out New York