Kirstin Valdez Quade
“What fuels my fiction is uncertainty, and not understanding things. I’m writing into uncertainty. That’s where the energy comes from.”
Kirstin Valdez Quade
(c) Holly Andres
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“An unputdownable novel, The Five Wounds takes my breath away with its intimate, humorous, and heart-aching portrayal of a New Mexican family. Kirstin Valdez Quade can make a reader laugh and break a reader’s heart in the same breath, and she leaves us, by the end of the novel, in awe of the dazzling power of her storytelling.”
“The characters in this engrossing novel are created in luminous and memorable detail. Just as the pacing is perfect, so too are the tact and care with which each scene is made. Kirstin Valdez Quade, by concentrating on the truth of small moments, has brought a whole world into focus.”
“Quade’s ability to depict an entire world within the limitations of a single story is reminiscent of Alice Munro… the final story …is an emotional tour de force.”
“Remarkable… In almost every story, Quade goes for vivid spectacle and theatrical plot twists… But Quade focuses just as intensely on the subtler customs, cruelties, kindnesses, and skewed alliances of precarious family life… If Quade ever yearned to escape her archaic Catholic heritage and redefine herself, let’s be glad she didn’t. Her vision has thrived on its fierce, flesh-conscious desire for transcendence.”
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s most recent book is the novel The Five Wounds (W.W. Norton & Co., 2021), which won the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is the author of the prize-winning short story collection Night at the Fiestas (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. It was a New York Times Notable Book, and was named a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Quade is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative, Guernica, The Southern Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.
When asked about the role faith plays in her fiction, Quade responded: “I think one of the reasons I'm interested in faith is that faith is so much about longing. It's about longing for transcendence, it's longing to be closer to the infinite and longing to connect with others; it's about empathy. And I think that's also the project of fiction. Fiction is about longing and empathy.”
Quade earned her B.A. from Stanford University and her M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Oregon in 2009. She was also a Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where she taught fiction and creative non-fiction. In 2014-15, she was the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. Originally from New Mexico, she now lives in New Jersey and teaches at Princeton University.
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The Five Wounds
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Night at the Fiestas
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