Roxana Robinson
“What the writer does is bear witness: we tell the stories of the things that disturb us most, and we try to tell them in the way that will disturb you most. All writers do this; it’s up to them to raise issues, ask questions, and call attention to things that must be addressed. Without writers, a society is silenced.”
“This lithe novel engrosses. Robinson’s storytelling is classic, page after page of swiftly moving scenes and writing as precise as rows of tilled earth. Robinson proves that writers can still evoke the silences and renunciations that thwart desire, and that stars still cross. The ending is a bombshell, eminently discussable.”
“A study of the complex joy and pain of late-life love, Leaving is a tour de force and arguably Robinson’s finest work yet. Robinson’s writing―unfailingly clear-eyed, packed with psychological insights―compels readers to care passionately about the characters. Leaving stands as a wondrous feat, and its final impact shatters.”
“With searing perception and genuine empathy, Robinson…captures the fraught nuances of complicated family dynamics, treating the spurned-lover trope with gentleness and compassion.”
“This is without question the best book ever written on O’Keeffe and an invaluable reattribution not only for scholars but for the general public. It is accurate, insightful, and beautifully written.”
“How should a white writer write about whiteness? In no particular way. One sits with the truth, holds it, troubles it and writes as far into it as one’s pen will go. Robinson acknowledges that Frank Dawson ‘wrote to explain the world to itself’ and that, in the end, no explanation could suffice. Dawson’s Fall asks what truth means in an era when conviction matters more, and Roxana Robinson’s answer — that morality is friable — should make us sit up and tremble.”
“Using far-flung sources and excruciating care, she creates the map; her novelist’s skills render it in 3-D. Few Americans may have an ancestry as acutely divergent across the Mason-Dixon Line as Robinson has, but the legacy of slavery and the Civil War is still being felt by our nation. Dawson’s Fall is a richly envisioned attempt to reconcile with that troubled history.”
“[Sparta] is not simply about war but about the horror and enforced isolation of trauma, the inevitable merging of the personal and the political, and the possibilities and trials found within the bonds of familial and romantic love. ”
“Robinson’s vivid, sensuous prose moves effortlessly among relationships and points of view, evoking a brutal war between familial love—in its infinite power and mystery—and the mechanical devastations of pathology.”
Roxana Robinson is the author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices.
Her recent novels include Leaving (W.W. Norton & Co., 2024), Dawson’s Fall (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019), and Sparta (Sarah Crichton Books, 2013), winner of the James Webb Award and named one the 10 Best Contemporary War Novels by Publishers Weekly. Her biography of Georgia O’Keefe, Georgia O’Keefe: A Life, widely considered the definitive O’Keefe biography, was reissued with a new foreward and previously unpublished letters by Brandeis University Press in 2020.
Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The Southampton Review, Ep!phany and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Holland and Spain.
Robinson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, and she was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. Robinson has served on the Boards of PEN and the Authors Guild, and was the president of the Authors Guild. She has received the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers Award,” given by Poets and Writers, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community from the Authors Guild.
Asked in an interview about her approach to writing sexual intimacy, she responded, “Whenever I write about this subject I feel the cold warning hand of memory, reminding me that John Updike, king of the intimate sexual encounter, once received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Bad Sex in Fiction from the Literary Review. I’m reminded that it’s possible to be too explicit, to force your reader to learn more than she wants. I don’t want that. I don’t want the reader to feel like a voyeur, watching a porn film. Instead, I want the reader to understand how it feels to be Sarah, in these scenes, and how it feels to be Warren. How it feels for them to meet in such an awkward and vulnerable state. I want to set down what real intimacy is—uncertain, hopeful, fragile. Dependent on trust.”
She teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College.
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