Homesick, Jennifer Croft
Homesick, Jennifer Croft
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Homesick
A Memoir

Author: Jennifer Croft

Narrator: Jennifer Croft, Boris Dralyuk, Emily Sutton-Smith

Unabridged: 4 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/28/2020

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

The coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words, and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy’s first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of fifteen her life changes drastically and with tragic results.

About Jennifer Croft

Jennifer Croft won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She has also received NEA, Cullman, PEN, Fulbright, and MacDowell fellowships and grants, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, and a Tin House Scholarship for her memoir Homesick, originally written in Spanish. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, BOMB, VICE, n+1 , Electric Literature , Tin House, Lit Hub, Guernica, the New Republic, The Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires.

About Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning translator and the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He taught Russian literature for a number of years at UCLA and at the University of St Andrews. He taught Russian literature for a number of years at UCLA and at the University of St Andrews.

About Emily Sutton-Smith

Emily Sutton-Smith is a professional actress and one of the cofounders of an Equity theater in central Michigan. Her stage credits include Out of Orbit; Doublewide; Summer Retreat; Too Much, Too Much, Too Many; Miracle on South Division Street; End Days; The Usual: A Musical Love Story; The Smell of the Kill; The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds; Maidens, Mothers and Crones; and Additional Particulars. A New York City native, she has worked onstage at almost all the Equity theaters in Michigan, including the Williamston Theatre, the Purple Rose Theatre, Performance Network Theatre, Tipping Point Theatre, the Detroit Rep, the Jewish Ensemble Theatre, and MeadowBrook Theatre. Emily is a proud member of the Actors' Equity Association and SAG/AFTRA. Her film and TV credits include The Funeral Guest, Gifted Hands, Butterfly Effect: Revelation, The Prince of Motor City, and Nevermore. Emily studied acting at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York City, and holds a Grande Diploma in Pastry Arts from the French Culinary Institute. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Michigan State University.

Reviews

Goodreads review by David

Conceptually, Homesick is a fascinating multi-textual project. Jennifer Croft is best known as a translator of Polish and Argentine Spanish, winning the 2018 International Booker among her accolades. So it makes sense that her foray into fiction would bridge languages, not to mention modes. Croft pu......more

Goodreads review by JimZ

Two months ago, I read Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun and very much liked it. There were lots of blurbs on the back of people who had something to say about it (reviewers, periodicals and such) and one of the blurbs was by Jennifer Croft. I believe at the time I had never heard of her. This was her......more

Goodreads review by Paul

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography Longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Jennifer Croft's Homesick began life as a novel written directly in Spanish, Serpientes y escaleras (Snakes and Ladders). The book was then re-writen and re-presented in English in the US as Homes......more

Goodreads review by Janet

In Jennifer Croft's impressionistic memoir of sisterhood, Amy and Zoe, two children from an academic family in Oklahoma, are absolutely different and yet inseparable. Amy, the elder sister, is the family star, the perfectionist, obsessed by words and actions and collections, protective and attached......more

Quotes

“A visual love letter to family, language, and self-understanding…Every page of this stunning and surprising book turns words around and around.” New York Times Book Review

“Jennifer Croft has written a gorgeous and stunningly visceral memoir of heartbreak and love. The lapidary sentences and the disarming images are surfaces Croft invites her readers to see into, so that a single word or photograph shimmers with layers of resonance…make no mistake about it: Homesick is an incantatory and masterful work of art.” Marisa Silver, author of Little Nothing

“Jennifer Croft’s Homesick is a marvel: audacious and lyrical in its telling, deeply moving in its wisdom. It is a memoir not only on love and its mysterious permutations, but on the vitality of language and art, which enable us to translate who we are, where we’ve been, and why we are forever homesick for that which we cannot have.” Vu Tran, author of Dragonfish

“Homesick, a poignant and moving meditation on family, friendship, place and the desire of the self to honor and transcend these and other ties, is a cause for celebration. It turns out one of our preeminent translators has an extraordinarily powerful story—and language—all her own.” Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Losing My Cool

“Jennifer Croft writes each full-color scene of her powerful book with feeling, urgency, and exactitude.” Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art

“To live with homesickness is to live in the beautifully bruising space of separation created by the rapture of experience. Star translator Jennifer Croft occupies this space masterfully.” Los Angeles Review of Books

“[A] marvel of a book that magically expresses the untranslatable…[of] the extent and limitations of love’s power.” Foreword Reviews

“This stunning memoir with photos is a love letter from one sister to another, a celebration of language and a story of devotion and disaster.” Shelf Awareness

“A heartbreaking, vanguard, and mixed-media coming-of-age memoir.” Booklist

“Croft’s book explores the interplay between words and images and the complexity of sisterly bonds with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity. Poignant, creative, and unique.” Kirkus Reviews

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