Name Helen Schulman Role Novelist | Movies P.S. | |
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Books This Beautiful Life, The revisionist, A Day at the Beach, PS, Not a free show Similar People Dylan Kidd, Jeffrey Sharp, Laura Linney, John Hart | ||
Interview with Helen Schulman | BackLit Talks | NYU Shanghai
Helen Schulman is an American novelist, short story, non-fiction, and screenwriter born in April 1961. Her fifth novel, This Beautiful Life, was an international bestseller, and was chosen in the 100 Notable Books of 2011 by the New York Times Book Review.
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Background and career
Helen Schulman was born in New York City where she lives, writes, teaches. She received a BA at Cornell University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She has published five novels, most recently This Beautiful Life in 2011, about which The New York Times wrote, “Riveting.... As much as this book fiercely inhabits our shared online reality, it operates most powerfully on a deeper level, posing an enduring question about American values.” The novel was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and was on numerous bestseller lists, including The New York Times, L.A. Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
A Day at the Beach, published in 2008, focuses on a family living through the September 11 attacks and the aftermath. The New Yorker wrote, “Schulman, in her fourth novel, gets both her cultural moment and the psychological particulars of a disintegrating marriage exactly right, and her writing is distractingly, almost brazenly beautiful. The result slyly demonstrates both the inadequacy of art and its insolent resilience in disaster’s aftermath.”
Schulman’s fiction, non-fiction, and reviews have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, and The Paris Review. She co-edited with Jill Bialosky the anthology, Wanting a Child.
She has written numerous screenplays, including co-writing an adaptation of her novel P.S., which was made into a film in 2004 starring Laura Linney. Schulman is adapting This Beautiful Life for Killer Films and Glass Elevator Media.
Schulman has taught in graduate programs at Columbia University, New York University. She teaches at the New School University where she is the Fiction coordinator at the Writing Program and a tenured Professor of Writing.