Lucy Ferriss - About Lucy

In Paris, writing Foreign Climes.

Signing books at Barnes & Noble

In Ravello, Italy, 2021.

Selected Works

Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children"

"Lucy Ferriss brings her signature honesty, clarity, and grace to bear on Christina Stead's famously challenging and rewarding novel about the frightening misuses of paternal power. I happily followed her into such literary byways as what to do with "impossible" characters (in books and in life), the virtues and pitfalls of excess in fiction, and how writing can sometimes save our souls. Through it all, Ferriss reckons with her own late father and his influence on her emerging artist's vision. This is a beautiful blend of memoir and deep reading."—Pamela Erens

Essays

Meditations for a New Century

"Lucy Ferriss's modern-day meditations are harrowing, whimsical, elegant, and probing. These beautifully composed pieces are small miracles of the essayist's art, and few writers at work today are as deft as Ferriss at finding wonder and meaning in the ordinary, the overlooked, the unusual, and the familiar." --Sudip Bose, American Scholar

Fiction

The Misconceiver

The Misconceiver is a startling novel in ways that highlight how unsurprising most pro-choice novels are. Ferriss isn't interested in merely confirming our liberal ideals; she makes us work for them. . . . The novel offers a challenging exploration of one woman's struggle to work through the profound moral dilemmas of her life. -- Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Foreign Climes

"The geographic breadth of Foreign Climes is only the beginning of its power. What makes the collection stunning is Ferriss's ability to go deep inside her characters, to the hidden places where we are foreign to those closest to us and even to ourselves, inviting profound reckoning." -- Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney

A Sister to Honor

"As ineluctable as a Greek tragedy." -- Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs

The Lost Daughter

"From its harrowing prologue to its final sentences, I was emotionally engaged with this fine novel. Ferriss is a masterful storyteller." —Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True

Memoir

Unveiling the Prophet

"Ferriss’s exploration of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet Ball is a must read. . . . This is one of the best books of the year."

-- Riverfront Times

About Lucy

Born in St. Louis, Lucy Ferriss has lived on both coasts, in the middle, and abroad. Her 1997 novel The Misconceiver, which imagines a post-Roe America in the 2020s, has suddenly risen to prominence with a lightning-fast reissue and is taking her on tour to raise money for reproductive rights. Her newly released collection Meditations for a New Century is the winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award. Her recent short fiction collection, Foreign Climes (Brighthorse, 2021), won the Brighthorse Books Award.

Other books include the novels A Sister to Honor (Penguin, 2015), The Lost Daughter (2012, a Book-of-the-Month pick), and Nerves of the Heart (2002); her memoir Unveiling the Prophet (2005, named Best Book of the Year by the Riverfront Times); her collection Leaving the Neighborhood and Other Stories (2001, winner of the Mid-List First Series Award). Other short fiction and essays have appeared most recently in The American Scholar, December, Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, and Novel Slices and have received recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Faulkner Society, the Fulbright Commission, and the International Society for Narrative, among others, She received her Ph.D. from Tufts University and lives with her husband, Don Moon, in the Berkshires and in Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence Emerita at Trinity College. She has two strong sons and abiding passions for music, politics, travel, tennis, and wilderness.

Forthcoming in September 2023 as part of Ig Publishing's Bookmarked Series is Lucy's autobiographical study, Christina Stead's THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN. She is currently working on a new novel, tentatively titled Paris Every Moment. Sign up for the mailing list to receive a preview!