Pearl Abraham

Pearl Abraham is the author of the novels, The Romance Reader (1995), Giving Up America (1998), The Seventh Beggar (2005), and most recently, American Taliban (2010). The Romance Reader, an international bestseller, was nominated for the UK’s Orange Award, a finalist for the Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” Award, a Literary Guild featured book, Library Journal’s Best Book of 1995, Contra Costa Times First Selection, San Antonio’s Times “brilliant, brilliant” pick, and more. It was translated into Dutch, Italian, German, Japanese, Norwegian, and Hungarian. The Seventh Beggar was a finalist for the 2006 Koret International Award in Fiction, but perhaps its greatest honor came from Harold Bloom who called it “a miracle of sympathetic imagination,” and excerpted it in his own book, Jesus and Yahweh. American Taliban was nominated for 2010 fiction awards. “Hasidic Noir,” a short story published in Brooklyn Noir, won the 2005 Shamus Award for Best Short Story about a private eye. Abraham’s op-eds, essays, and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Michigan Quarterly, Epoch, WAMC (NPR) and elsewhere. Abraham is also the editor of the Dutch anthology Een sterke vrouw, wie zal haar vinden? (Not the Image of an Ideal: Jewish Heroines in Literature) (Meulenhoff, 2000). She has taught in the MFA Writing Programs at Sarah Lawrence College and The University of Houston, and is currently assistant professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Western New England College, in Western Massachusetts. This June, she will teach Craft of Fiction at New York University. She lives in NYC and Columbia County, NY.