The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer
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The Interestings

Author: Meg Wolitzer

Narrator: Jen Tullock

Unabridged: 15 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 04/09/2013


Synopsis

“Remarkable . . . With this book [Wolitzer] has surpassed herself.”—The New York Times Book Review

"A victory . . . The Interestings secures Wolitzer's place among the best novelists of her generation. . . . She's every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn't women's fiction. It's everyone's."—Entertainment Weekly (A)

The New York Times–bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer that has been called "genius" (The Chicago Tribune), “wonderful” (Vanity Fair), "ambitious" (San Francisco Chronicle), and a “page-turner” (Cosmopolitan), which The New York Times Book Review says is "among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot."

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.

Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author Bio

American author, Meg Worlitzer, has been the first author to participate in a coast to coast book club discussion via Skype. That would seem to be a great way to promote her work most advantageously. The work discussed was The Uncoupling. Meg was born in 1959 in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother was also a novelist and her dad, a psychologist. She graduated from Smith College and Brown University in creative writing. Her first writing was accomplished during undergrad, entitled, Sleepwalking, a tale of three college girls who were obsessed with poetry and death, and was published in 1982.

Her novels include: The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. These were all on the New York Times-bestselling list. She also co-authored a cryptic crossword book, and has taught creative writing in several important venues. Three films have evolved from her writings, including This Is Your Life, scripted and directed by Nora Ephron.

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