Rediscovering the Pathbreaking Fiction of Nancy Hale

Wednesday, June 21—Best-selling author Kate Bolick joins LOA LIVE to discuss one of the most gifted American writers of the mid–twentieth century. Nancy Hale, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, explored women and children’s inner lives in luminous and deeply felt work far ahead of its time. Two new LOA paperbacks restore these lost classics: Where the Light Falls: Selected Stories of Nancy Hale and the best-selling 1942 novel The Prodigal Women, whose uncompromising portrayal of women’s shifting roles, open sexuality, and ambivalence toward motherhood pries open what Bolick in her introduction calls “the gap between what liberation looks like, and what it actually is.” Kate Bolick is the best-selling author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, and coauthor of March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women. She teaches writing at Yale University.