Join us for an engaging online conversation as Heidi Pitlor, editor of The Best American Short Stories, delves deep into the writing life of Jessica Shattuck, author of the novels The Women in the Castle, a New York Times Bestseller and winner of The New England Book Award; Perfect Life; and The Hazards of Good Breeding. Asking questions not typically asked of female writers, Pitlor will get to the core of what it means to be a fiction author today. This will not be your standard book talk!

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Called an "a masterful epic," and "a poignant WWII page-turner" Jessica Shattuck's most best-selling The Women in the Castle is a dramatic yet nuanced portrait of war and its repercussions that explores what it means to survive, love, and, ultimately, to forgive in the wake of unimaginable hardship.

Jessica Shattuck is the author of the novels The Women in the Castle, a New York Times Bestseller and winner of The New England Book Award; Perfect Life; and The Hazards of Good Breeding, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Boston Globe best book of the year. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Glamour, Open City, and The Tampa Review among other publications.

Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Wired, The Believer Magazine, and The Boston Globe. She lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, MA.

Heidi Pitlor is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage, which was optioned for film. Her third novel, Impersonation, will come out on August 18, 2020. A former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, she has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007. She is also the editorial director of the literary studio, Plympton. Her writing has been published in Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, and elsewhere. She lives outside Boston.

The Mount is a Massachusetts Cultural Council UP designated organization welcoming participants of all disabilities. Please contact The Mount at 413-551-5100 or by email, info@edithwharton.org, to discuss accommodations needed to participate fully in this event.