House Arrest
by Mary Morris
List Price: $12.00
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312155476
Publisher: Picador USA
Morris began writing when she was a graduate student at Columbia. "I wrote one [short story] and sent it to Redbook. They bought it and paid me a phenomenal amount of money. I wrote another and they paid me more money. I thought, this is great, I'm going to make a living as a short story writer. Then for 10 years I didn't sell another story commercially . . . I was just about to give up when I got an NEA grant."
Mary Morris
is also the author of the novels The Night Sky, (available from
Picador USA), Crossroads, and The Waiting Room; two travel
memoirs, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone
and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail; and the award-winning
story collections Vanishing Animals and Other Stories and The
Bus of Dreams. Her new story collection is The Lifeguard. Mary
Morris teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn,
New York, with her husband and daughter.
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In her own words: (from article in Newcity, by David Marc Fischer, May 23, 1996)
"If somebody said, 'Define yourself in a word,' she says, "I'd say 'storyteller' -- because that's really what I do." Telling stories, Morris freely traverses the boundaries of fact and fantasy. She tells me that, if ever she has biographers. "I hope that they will spend a lot of time puzzling over what the truth is and what the fiction is. Because sometimes -- to be perfectly honest -- I'm not necessarily even telling the truth in the nonfiction. I mean, I'm just telling -- or retelling -- a story."
(from PW interview, March 15, 1993)
"Once I start working, I never go out . . . At 4 o'clock every day I take a walk or do something physical in order to change gears. I always carry a small notepad and usually end up writing a line or two."
© Copyright 2009 by Mary Morris. Reprinted with permission by Picador USA. All rights reserved.
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