First highlighted in The New Yorker fiction issue, here is award-winning writer Nell Freudenberger’s debut story collection Lucky Girls is a collection of five novella-like stories, which take place mostly in Asia. The characters―expatriates, often by accident―are attracted to the places they find themselves in a romantic way, or repelled by a landscape where every object seems strange. For them, falling in love can be inseparable from the place where it happens. 
 Living according to unfamiliar rules, these characters are also vulnerable in unique ways. In the title story, a young woman who has been involved in a five-year affair with a married Indian man feels bound to both her memories and her adopted country after his death. The protagonist of “Outside the Eastern Gate” returns to her childhood home in Delhi, to find a house still inhabited by the impulsive, desperate spirit of her mother, who left her family for a wild journey over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. In “Letter from the Last Bastion,” a teenage girl begins a correspondence with a novelist who’s built his reputation writing about his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and who, in his letters, confides in her a secret about his past. 
 Highly anticipated in the literary community and beyond, Lucky Girls marks the debut of a very special talent that places her among today’s most gifted young writers.

Lucky Girls: Stories

Literature & Fiction

FREUDENBERGER, Nell

United States

Ecco

Here are five stories, set in Southeast Asia and on the Indian subcontinent -- each one bearing the weight and substance of a short novella -- narrated by young women who find themselves, often as expatriates, face to face with the compelling circumstances of adult love.Living in unfamiliar places, according to new and often frightening rules, these characters become vulnerable in unexpected ways -- and learn, as a result, to articulate the romantic attraction to landscapes and cultures that are strange to them.
Lucky Girls marks the arrival of a writer of exceptional talents, one whose generosity of spirit, clarity of intellect and emotion, and skill in storytelling set her among today’s most gifted and exciting young voices.

From the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes a bold, intricately woven first novel about an enigmatic stranger who disrupts the life of one American family.
Yuan Zhao, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one year's artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St. Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. But when their guest arrives, the Traverses are preoccupied with their own problems. Cece—devoted mother and contemporary art enthusiast—worries about the recent arrest of her son, Max. Unable to communicate with her husband, Gordon, a psychiatrist distracted by his passion for genealogical research, she turns to Gordon's wayward brother, Phil. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Olivia Travers is just relieved that her classmates seem to be ignoring the weird Chinese art teacher living in her pool house—at least until a brilliant but troublesome new student appears in his class.
The dissident, for his part, is delighted to be left alone. His relationship to the 1989 Democracy Movement and his past in a Beijing underground artists' community together give him reason for not wanting to be scrutinized too carefully. The trouble starts when he and his American hosts begin to see one another with clearer eyes. 
A novel about secrets, love, and the shining chaos of everyday American life, The Dissident is a remarkable and surprising group portrait, done with a light, sure hand. Reviewing Lucky Girls, the Seattle Times praised Freudenberger's "merciless and often hilarious eye for family dynamics, and her equally sharp eye for cultures in collision." These talents and others are on full display here, as the author captures her characters in their struggles with art, with identity—and with one another. As the New York Times Book Review observed, "Young writers as ambitious—and as good—as Nell Freudenberger give us a reason for hope."

The Dissident: A Novel

Dramas & Plays

From the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes an intricately woven novel about secrets, love, art, identity, and the shining chaos of every day American life.
Yuan Zhao, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one-year artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St. Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. The Traverses are too preoccupied with their own problems to pay their foreign guest too much attention, and the dissident is delighted to be left alone—his past links with radical movements give him good reason to avoid careful scrutiny. The trouble starts when he and his American hosts begin to view one another with clearer eyes.

The Dissident: A Novel (P.S.)

Harper-perennial

Lucky Girls: Stories (P.S.)

LUCKY GIRLS (Art of the Story)

EccoPress

'Young writers as ambitious - and as good - as Nell Freudenberger give us reason for hope' New York Times 'In the first few months after Charlie died, I began hearing from her much more frequently'
Helen Clapp is a physics professor. She doesn't believe in pseudo-science, or time travel and especially not in ghosts. So when she gets a missed call from Charlie, her closest friend from university with whom she hasn't spoken in over a year, Helen thinks there must be some mistake. Because Charlie died two days ago. 
Then when her young son, Jack, claims to have seen Charlie in their house just the other day, Helen begins to have doubts. 
Through the grief of the husband and daughter she left behind, Helen is drawn into the orbit of Charlie's world, slotting in the missing pieces of her friend's life. And, as she delves into the web of their shared past, Helen finds herself entangled in the forgotten threads of her own life. 
Lost and Wanted is a searing novel from one of America's most exciting writers about the sacred knottiness of female friendship, the forces which fuse us together and those which drive us apart. 
'Freudenberger draws women's complex lives as brilliantly as Austen or Wharton or Woolf' Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of Marriage

Lost and Wanted

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

VIKING

Genre Fiction

VIKIN

Penguin

A powerful, funny, richly observed tour de force by one of America’s most acclaimed young writers: a story of love and marriage, secrets and betrayals, that takes us from the backyards of America to the back alleys and villages of Bangladesh. In The Newlyweds, we follow the story of Amina Mazid, who at age twenty-four moves from Bangladesh to Rochester, New York, for love. A hundred years ago, Amina would have been called a mail-order bride. But this is an arranged marriage for the twenty-first century: Amina is wooed by—and woos—George Stillman online. For Amina, George offers a chance for a new life and a different kind of happiness than she might find back home. For George, Amina is a woman who doesn’t play games. But each of them is hiding something: someone from the past they thought they could leave behind. It is only when they put an ocean between them—and Amina returns to Bangladesh—that she and George find out if their secrets will tear them apart, or if they can build a future together. The Newlyweds is a surprising, suspenseful story about the exhilarations—and real-life complications—of getting, and staying, married. It stretches across continents, generations, and plains of emotion. What has always set Nell Freudenberger apart is the sly, gimlet eye she turns on collisions of all kinds—sexual, cultural, familial. With The Newlyweds, she has found her perfect subject for that vision, and characters to match. She reveals Amina’s heart and mind, capturing both her new American reality and the home she cannot forget, with seamless authenticity, empathy, and grace. At once revelatory and affecting, The Newlyweds is a stunning achievement.

The Newlyweds

KNOPF

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by FREUDENBERGER, Nell. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by FREUDENBERGER, Nell

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by FREUDENBERGER, Nell. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lucky Girls: Stories

Lucky Girls: Stories

The Dissident: A Novel

The Dissident: A Novel (P.S.)

Lucky Girls: Stories (P.S.)

LUCKY GIRLS (Art of the Story)

Lost and Wanted

Lost and Wanted

Lost and Wanted

The Newlyweds