Emily Meier: 6 books

It is the late 1850s and a young Irishman, having abandoned his studies for the priesthood, arrives in New Harmony, Indiana in the afterglow of its utopian experiment and soon finds himself both in love with the town’s most alluring woman and immersed in the horrifying violence of war. Told with...

Watching Oksana features disparate voices, most of them speaking from the late twentieth century. The opening group of stories, “What You Do for Love,” is linked thematically, all of its protagonists in uniquely intense yet familiar parent–child relationships. “American Snapshot, 1993” is...

In the Land of the Dinosaur: Ten Stories and a Novella—In the Land of the Dinosaur is set in 1980s small-town and rural Wisconsin. The title story, which opens the collection, creates its landscape and sets the tone of an insular world buffeted by change. The stories are not connected in terms of...

When a young woman, trained from childhood in astrology, rejoins a colorful group of traveling players as a replacement for her magician husband, who was lost in an explosion, her precarious state imperils the entire troupe. The Second Magician’s Tale—a novel set in the 1970s and bookended by mirroring calamities—is a story of loss, obsession, and escape.

A novel that ranges over the subjects of loss, marriage, politics, and art, Time Stamp is a searing depiction of the way parents’ lives affect their children through their untold or barely told stories—things that exist in the ether of family life and persist, yet play out differently on the stage...

Traveling from present-day Chicago to the Bicentennial summer of 1976 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and New Orleans, and then to Minnesota in the late 1950s, Clare, Loving: A Novel in Three Novellas is the story of Clare McHenry, whose mirroring estrangements from her mother and daughter are shaped by the...