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Paul Harding

Paul Harding has an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2000) and was a 20002001 Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA.

He has published short stories in Shakepainter and The Harvard Review. Paul currently teaches creative writing at Harvard. His first novel, Tinkers, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Genres: Historical, Literary Fiction

Novels

   Tinkers (2009)
   Enon (2013)
   This Other Eden (2023)

Paul Harding recommends

This Strange Eventful History (2024)
Claire Messud
"What an extraordinary experience This Strange Eventful History gives to readers. It takes them on artful and masterfully orchestrated grand tours: of the world as it spins toward and away from World War II into nearly our own time, of three generations of the Cassar family as it concentrates and disperses and arrays itself across the spinning world, of the individual family members as they each experience in their own indelible ways how history enfolds and excludesus, how time-implacable and indecipherable-befalls us, and how love may possibly be the only true human masterpiece, elusive as it so often and tragically proves to be. Claire Messud captures the heartbreaking paradoxes of being in our world and in ourselves yet feeling separated from both with a precision and acuity like no other writer I know."

The Road from Belhaven (2024)
Margot Livesey
"Margot Livesey's prose is so lucid, so precise, and so understated as she goes about conjuring and sustaining the lives of her characters, that the reader hardly notices how deep a claim Lizzie Craig has laid on the heart until it is in danger of breaking on her behalf. The only thing I could think to do when I finished the book was to begin again, I didn't want it to end."

Idlewild (2023)
James Frankie Thomas
"So smart, so funny, so outrageous, so scary, so bittersweet, and so heartbreaking, James Frankie Thomas's Idlewild is a huge, brilliant, coming of age omnibus of adolescent mischief, uproar, and friendship, of exquisite comedy and profound courtesy, of love and resentment, secret crushes and true confessions, all of it suffused with the most knowing and big-hearted insights of adult retrospect. Thomas's writing is utterly artful, the story utterly kinetic and headlong and beautiful - the whole thing kept me mesmerized from the first page to the last. Bravo."

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. (2022)
Lee Kravetz
"It would be easy, too easy perhaps, to see The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. as a spiritual sequel to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, but Lee Kravetz's novel is very much its own thing, an audacious imagining that will have readers greedy to learn more about Plath and her literary cohort."

The World Gives Way (2021)
Marissa Levien
"The World Gives Way pulls off the seemingly impossible, giving readers a science fiction epic, a crime thriller, an existential consideration of human mortality and the meanings of life, and a profound meditation on love – all in one supernova of a debut novel."

Please See Us (2020)
Caitlin Mullen
"Please See Us is so good I don't even know where to start - it's brilliant and it's dark; it's heartbreaking and it's defiant; it's a riveting thriller and it's a literary gem. Here are true, beautiful portraits of girls and women whose lives might well otherwise pass by without notice, without proper human value. Caitlin Mullen brings us those lives magnificently- with subtlety, compassion, and utter dignity. This book is a stunner."

Such a Fun Age (2019)
Kiley Reid
"Gripping, substantive, complicated, compelling, and just plain true. . . . These characters laid claim to me, and their stories became important to me in the way art does that to its readers, viewers, listeners. . . . Such a fantastic, serious, and, I should say, fun read."

The Study of Animal Languages (2019)
Lindsay Stern
"Artful and astute, funny and unnerving, The Study of Animal Languages brilliantly captures how easily we can mistake our impressions of the world, and the models we make of them, for the world itself. A knockout."

A Place for Us (2018)
Fatima Farheen Mirza
"‘Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place For Us is a work of extraordinary and enthralling beauty. It is so deeply imagined, so intimately attentive to and solicitous of the lives it follows, so artful in describing the inseparable human experiences of pride and resentment, humility and loyalty -- and, most of all, love – that it feels not as if we are reading a novel about this Indian Muslim family struggling with tradition and a new culture, but as if we become actual members of the family. It is that immersive, that brilliant, that true."

The House of Impossible Beauties (2018)
Joseph Cassara
"A marvelously serious, deep, artful, humane read. I'm really knocked out by this...[Cassara] managed to put actual, living, breathing human beings on the page....There's so much downright gorgeous prose here, so many beautifully and precisely observed images, subjects, emotions. Beautiful because true.'"

More recommendations

Awards

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Best Book winner (2010) : Tinkers

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