Writers selection, and If We Had Known. Juska’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The
Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Electric
Literature, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize
from Ploughshares, and her short fiction has been cited by The Best American Short
Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts
in Philadelphia.
[The Page 69 Test: Reunion; My Book, The Movie: Reunion]
At Lit Hub Juska tagged "eight novels that explore the complexities of reunions—with classmates from college and high school, close friends or near strangers, and former versions of ourselves." One title on the list:
Elizabeth Berg, The Last Time I Saw YouRead about the other entries on the list.
Berg’s Talk Before Sleep is a novel that gutted me when I first read it—a spare, unsentimental story of adult friendship, midlife, and mortality. Here, Berg revisits these themes through a different lens: a fortieth high school reunion in the Midwest told from the points of view of five returning classmates.
For each, the reunion promises something different—escape, salvation, a second chance—but ultimately compels them to look inward.
--Marshal Zeringue