Friday, September 4, 2020

Ten women-authored novels set in remote and forgotten places

Annie Lampman is the author of the novel Sins of the Bees and the limited-edition letterpress poetry chapbook Burning Time. Her short stories, poetry, and narrative essays have been published in sixty-some literary journals and anthologies such as The Normal School, Orion Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Women Writing the West. She has been awarded the 2020 American Fiction Award in Thriller: Crime, the Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction, the Everybody Writes Award in Poetry, a Best American Essays “Notable,” a Pushcart Prize special mention, a Literature Fellowship special mention by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and a wilderness artist’s residency in the Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness through the Bureau of Land Management. Lampman is an Associate Professor of Honors Creative Writing at the Washington State University Honors College. She lives with her husband, three sons, and a bevy of pets (including a tabby named Bonsai and a husky named Tundra) in Moscow, Idaho on the rolling hills of the Palouse Prairie in another 1800s farmhouse. She has a pollinator garden full of native flowers, herbs, berries, song birds, squirrels, butterflies, bumble bees, solitary bees, and honeybees.

At CrimeReads, Lampan tagged "ten novels [that] fulfill all the promise settings of the remote or forgotten have to offer to compelling and diverse women-authored fiction," including:
Washington Black, Esi Edugyan

Set on a Barbados sugar plantation in 1830 and then moving to the frozen Far North, with stops in London and Morocco as well, this novel’s settings are as dynamic as its characters, surprising both in their breadth and depth, and the sheer exuberance of their brutality and beauty. The settings and characters that unwind in this novel—spooling out into disaster and completion—are both airily fantastical as well as deeply grounded to the earth and frozen tundra. The extreme nature of place reflects back onto the characters and informs who they are and what choices they make in a breathtaking, rollicking ride.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue