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Mona Simpson

Bio: 
Mona Simpson worked as a journalist before attending graduate school where she published her first short stores in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. While in New York, she worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road. Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, an NEA grant, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.

Michelle Huneven is the author of three novels --Blame, Jamesland and Round Rock, all of which have been nominated for an LA Times Book Award. Her nonfiction writings include restaurant reviews for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, other food journalism and, with Bernadette Murphy, the Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate. She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers' Award for fiction. Michelle currently teaches creative writing at UCLA.

Love: Three Perspectives—Two Novels and a Psychoanalyst

Michelle Huneven and Mona Simpson
In Conversation with Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
00:55:54
ALOUD
Listen:
Episode Summary

New novels from Michelle Huneven (Off Course) and Mona Simpson (Casebook) both deal with love and its moral varieties, from quite different perspectives. As their characters variously struggle to forge lasting connections, they evoke issues long familiar to the psychoanalyst. Is it possible to separate out the strands of fantasy and projection, family patterning, and primal need from adult love? What makes highly intelligent, thoughtful people so thoroughly lose their way in love’s enchantment? Joining the authors to discuss love’s tangled and complex morality is eminent psychoanalyst and theorist Dr. Christopher Bollas.

Participant(s) Bio

Michelle Huneven is the author of three previous novels:Blame, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Jamesland, and Round Rock.

Mona Simpson’s novels include My Hollywood, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, The Lost Father and Anywhere But Here. Her work has been recognized with numerous prizes, including the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize, the Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Most recently, she was the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and letters. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, Harpers, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s and The Paris Review.

Christopher Bollas, Ph.D., is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and an Honorary Member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York. Among his books are Catch Them Before They Fall (The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown) and The Christopher Bollas Reader, with forward by Adam Phillips.

My Hollywood

In conversation with Michelle Huneven
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
01:03:33
ALOUD
Listen:
Episode Summary
The new novel by the celebrated author of Anywhere But Here tells the story of two women whose lives entwine and unfold behind the glittery surface of Hollywood.
Participant(s) Bio
Mona Simpson worked as a journalist before attending graduate school where she published her first short stores in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. While in New York, she worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road. Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, an NEA grant, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.

Michelle Huneven is the author of three novels --Blame, Jamesland and Round Rock, all of which have been nominated for an LA Times Book Award. Her nonfiction writings include restaurant reviews for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, other food journalism and, with Bernadette Murphy, the Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate. She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers' Award for fiction. Michelle currently teaches creative writing at UCLA.

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