Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories have received a Pushcart Prize and the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Prize and have appeared in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Agni, Epoch, Strange Horizons, Greensboro Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. As a journalist, she has written for the Hollywood Reporter, Filmmaker Magazine, TheWrap.Com and The Washington Post. Also an award-winning filmmaker, she has taught at Emerson College, University of Southern California, and UCLA-Extension and is currently a visiting full-time screenwriting professor at Loyola Marymount University, School of Film and Television.
At Lit Hub Kuryla tagged "six works [that] resonate for me as nuanced characters who resist the bounds of traditional motherhood to lead unconventional lives," include:
Toni Morrison, BelovedLearn about the other entries on the list.
Toni Morrison’s inimitable novel Beloved holds within it one of the most profound and painful maternal secrets ever brought to literary light. Sethe, a formerly enslaved person, now resides with her daughter in a house in Ohio which ishaunted by a poltergeist-like spirit. When the spirit takes the corporeal form of a young woman named Beloved, Sethe abandons herself to Beloved’s every need, attempting to repair her earlier efforts to kill her children to avoid their recapture. Sethe believes the character of Beloved is the incarnation of the infant that died at her hand. This act and its expiation consume Sethe until she is so reduced by her maternal obsession for Beloved that only one thing will save her: confronting her own need to form a separate identity. The novel, among its many astonishments and radical challenges to hierarchies of power, employs a maternal act of singular transgression to ask a forbidden question: does a mother owe her children and society her life and her soul? Isn’t this just another form of enslavement?
Beloved also appears on Daryl Gregory's list of ten Southern gothic novels that changed the game, Anne Enright's list of six amazing books, Candice Carty-Williams's list of six heroic women in literature, Kate Racculia's list of ten gothic fiction titles that meant something to her, Emily Temple's list of the ten books that defined the 1980s, Megan Abbott's list of six of the best books based on true crimes, Melba Pattillo Beals's 6 favorite books list, Sarah Porter's list of five favorite books featuring psychological hauntings, Matthew Fellion and Katherine Inglis' list of ten books that were subject to silencing or censorship, Jeff Somers's list of ten fictional characters based on real people, Christopher Barzak's top five list of books about magical families, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's ten top list of wartime love stories, Judith Claire Mitchell's list of ten of the best (unconventional) ghosts in literature, Kelly Link's list of four books that changed her, a list of four books that changed Libby Gleeson, The Telegraph's list of the 15 most depressing books, Elif Shafak's top five list of fictional mothers, Charlie Jane Anders's list of ten great books you didn't know were science fiction or fantasy, Peter Dimock's top ten list of books that challenge what we think we know as "history", Stuart Evers's top ten list of homes in literature, David W. Blight's list of five outstanding novels on the Civil War era, John Mullan's list of ten of the best births in literature, Kit Whitfield's top ten list of genre-defying novels, and at the top of one list of contenders for the title of the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years.
--Marshal Zeringue
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