Dennis Lehane was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts. His novels include
A Drink Before the War;
Darkness, Take My Hand;
Sacred;
Gone, Baby, Gone;
Prayers for Rain;
Mystic River;
Shutter Island;
The Given Day; and the newly released
Moonlight Mile.
Mystic River was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and it won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel as well as the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction given by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Before becoming a full-time writer, Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers. His one regret is that no one ever gave him a chance to tend bar. He lives in the Boston, Massachusetts, area.
One title from his list of five favorite short story collections, as told to
The Daily Beast:
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love introduced me to the modern short story. The first story “Why Don’t You Dance?” might be the densest “minimalist” story ever written, a seven-page masterpiece about a brokenhearted guy who puts all of his household possessions out on his front lawn, and a young couple wanders by and thinks it’s a yard sale. And it just gets better from there, story by story, building to the savage grace of the title story. In terms of short fiction in America, this book was an inarguable game changer.
Read about
the other books on Lehane's list.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love appears on
Ward Just's list of six books with an “autumnal” quality.
Read about
Dennis Lehane's five most important books.
--Marshal Zeringue
Jonathan Miles is the author, most recently, of The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy.Although a novel, "A Perfect Spy" reveals some deep truths about espionage and betrayal. The book has some basis in the author's own experience—indeed, le Carré has described the writing of it as an act of self-psychotherapy. In passages devoted to the childhood of the book's hero, Magnus Pym, we witness the shaping of a future agent as the boy's loyalties are pulled between a flashy father and a victimized mother. Studying his father's skills as a con man, while eavesdropping on abuse and dereliction, the young Pym becomes the apparently perfect—yet tragically imperfect—spy. In his split narrative, le Carré gives us a gripping manhunt even as he offers a work of penetrating psychology in which the soul of the hero is the contested territory.
