The quiet architecture of ordinary lives.
Eleanor Voss writes novels that examine the unspoken contracts between people, the small fractures that alter entire decades, and the peculiar dignity of restraint.
Eleanor Voss writes novels that examine the unspoken contracts between people, the small fractures that alter entire decades, and the peculiar dignity of restraint.
Born in 1949 in the coastal town of Mendocino, Eleanor Voss has published four novels and a collection of stories. Her work has been praised for its precise attention to domestic detail and its refusal of easy resolution. She lives in the same house where she wrote her first book, surrounded by the same fog that appears on nearly every page she writes.
She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1995 she was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
A widowed schoolteacher in Northern California begins receiving unsigned letters from someone who claims to know the precise hour her husband died. Over one long summer she confronts what she has chosen not to see.
Three generations of women correspond across decades while living on the same stretch of shoreline. The novel moves between 1947 and 1973, tracing what is said and what is carefully omitted.
Eleven stories about people who believe they are living ordinary lives until a single measurement—distance, time, or silence—reveals otherwise.