Name Jane Unrue | Role Writer | |
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Books Life of a Star, Atlassed, The House | ||
Jane Unrue is an American writer and educator. She was born in Columbus, Ohio, grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (B.A.) and Brown University (M.F.A.). She has taught at Emerson College, Boston College, and Wellesley College, and currently teaches at Harvard University, where she directs the Harvard Scholars at Risk (SAR) Program and chairs the Freedom to Write Committee board for PEN New England. Unrue’s work is experimental; she is an intensely lyrical stylist. Her poetic prose creates her personal version of Space-Time. In other words, she transforms locations, things, landscapes, and portraits of characters to Time and transforms her fictional time of memory - loneliness, insecurity, inexpressible emotions of characters - to the Spaces and Things around. Willingly, unwillingly, her reader becomes an observer of her world and her words. In her somehow minimalistic style, she invites the reader to imagine the imagination of the novel and to participate as a kind of co-writer.
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Works
Reception
“Rather than leading us out of the maze, the narrative thread has itself become a labyrinthine tangle. We don’t get far before we’re stopped and pushed in a different direction, space, situation. From reality into dream, from the erotic to mock mystery, horror, humor, from architectural precision to the dark wood of fairy tales. And, amazingly, we would like to stay forever in this tangle made delightful by the very rhythm of cut-offs and repetitions—and the sheer power of Unrue’s language. A remarkable tour de force.” — Rosmarie Waldrop on Love Hotel
“A truly riveting novel.” — Midwest Book Review on Life of a Star
“Emotionally thorough, dense but not crammed, and unnoisily original in the blood-beat and quiver of its prose. Unrue writes intricate, ribbony sentences that often reel themselves into the safeholds of eccentrically stacked, unindented paragraphs as lyrically loaded as Joseph Cornell boxes. It dispenses itself in silvery, pivotal declarations and gleaming summation. It's a novel cored to the climactics, the crucialities—and it's entirely perfection.” — The Believer on Life of a Star