凡人

by Mona Simpson, 苏静涛 (Translator)

这本书描述了一个我们未曾认识过的乔布斯——他是硅谷大亨，是百万富翁。从多年前负气离开的女友，到多年后不肯相认的骨肉，他的亲生父母缺席多年，后来又成了别人眼中不称职的父亲。他的人生跌宕起伏，他到达过事业的巅峰，也跌落至深谷；他是人生的苦行僧，亦是执着的工作狂，他很早就找到了钟情的事业，也邂逅了自己的灵魂伴侣，终于领悟亲情与爱是最珍贵的。他是纯粹的素食主义者，他奉行极简主义，报章追逐着他的隐私，却永远难以在文章中复现他的人生，这个热爱花椰菜的男人改变了世界，也注定和这个世界有着无法化解的隔阂。

《凡人》是莫娜·辛普森继《在别处》和《消失的父亲》之后的第三部小说，以第一人称叙述者简·迪·娜塔莉的口吻，延续了同样的主题：对缺席的父亲角色的探讨和沟通。书中的父亲，汤姆·欧文斯，是一名生物技术公司巨头，身家百万。作为他的女儿，简有着显赫的出身，却在乡间小镇长大，相依为命的母亲玛丽已经无法再继续照顾她，而身为父亲的汤姆还完全没有准备好接纳她的存在……

384 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2016

About the author

Mona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, then moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother was the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson went to Berkeley, where she studied poetry. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia’s MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road.

Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, A Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She worked ten years on My Hollywood. “It’s the book that took me too long because it meant to much to me,” she says.

Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartelby the dog.

For more about upcoming readings and events, visit Mona's website http://www.monasimpson.com
and her Facebook author page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mona-Si...