Lucy Ferriss - Short Stuff

My mother's purse, from "Stitches in Time"

Bodhisattvas, from "Gandara in Suburbia"

New England Review staff writer Belinda Huang interviews Lucy about "Meditation in Middle G" and hitting the right notes.

Lucy, kindergarten Christmas

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

Short Stuff

How My Novel Disappeared and Why It Came Back

This article in LitHub, published Oct. 26, 2022, gives the skinny on the death and rebirth of The Misconceiver.

It's 2040. We Need to Keep Abortion Legal in New York.

A New York Times op-ed updating The Misconceiver for our world today -- and in the near future.

Belles Lettres

Some of these are links, others downloads. If you're not sure whether you've retrieved a piece successfully, check the folder in which your downloads generally land.

Stitches in Time: A Meditation on Needlepoint and Mortality, from The American Scholar. (Subscription required; it's a great journal!)

Meditation on Middle G, from New England Review.

Meditation on a Rat, from The American Scholar.

Bush, from Fourth Genre.

"Gandara in Suburbia," from Arts & Letters. (84.6 KB)

"Writing the Body" from the Southern Review. (680 KB)

Stories

"Concorde," from Foreign Literary Journal

"The Difficulty of Translation," from Michigan Quarterly Review

"Lucky Woman," from december magazine (3.3 MB)

Memoir

"Strange Brew," from the New York Times Magazine.

"My Son's Gamble," from the New York Times Magazine

Modern Love, from the New York Times