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Alena Graedon

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Alena Graedon

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August 2007


Alena Graedon's first novel, The Word Exchange, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and Paperback Row pick, and selected as a best novel of 2014 by Kirkus. It has been translated into eight languages. Graedon’s nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Book Review, newyorker.com, The Believer magazine, and Guernica, among other places, and her short fiction has appeared in VICE magazine.

Graedon has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Corporation of Yaddo, The Ucross Foundation, The Jentel Artist Residency, VCCA, and The Vermont Studio Center. A native of North Carolina, Graedon is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's MFA program. She has taught at Columbia and Monmouth universities, and she liv
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Average rating: 3.35 · 4,261 ratings · 1,014 reviews · 1 distinct workSimilar authors
The Word Exchange

3.35 avg rating — 4,261 ratings — published 2014 — 40 editions
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Quotes by Alena Graedon  (?)
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“Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one.”
Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange

“Words, I've come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased”
Alena Graedon

“Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can’t go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we’ve seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what’s not. The Word, after all, is God.”
Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange

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