Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Micheline Aharonian Marcom (born 1968) is an important American novelist of Armenian descent.

Life and Work

Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1968 to an American father and an Armenian-Lebanese mother. She grew up in Los Angeles, but, as a child in the years before the Lebanese Civil War, she spent summers in Beirut with her mother's family. Her first book, Three Apples Fell from Heaven (2001), set in Turkey between 1915–1917, depicts the Ottoman government's genocide of the Armenian population and was named one of the best books of the year by both The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. Her second book in the trilogy, The Daydreaming Boy (2004), which earned her the 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as the 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction, is centered on a haunted middle-aged genocide survivor living in 1960’s Beirut, itself facing imminent collapse. Her third book, Draining the Sea (2008), is a fiercely critical novel of America's complicit involvement in Guatemala's civil war.

Marcom’s fourth novel, originally titled “The Edge of Love,” referring to Clarice Lispector's story “That’s Where I’m Going,” but published as The Mirror in the Well (2008), is an exquisite and at the same time terrifying account of an episode in the life of a woman who realizes that she is trapped in the painfully quotidian traffic of American urban life and its culture.

Marcom lives in Northern California where she teaches Creative Writing at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Awards

• 2006 Whiting Writers' Award^[1][2]
• 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction^[3]
• 2004 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship^[4][5]

Publications

• The Myth of Genocide. Mills College. 1999.  Master's Thesis.
• Three Apples Fell from Heaven. Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated. 2002. ISBN 9781573229159. 
• The Daydreaming Boy. Riverhead Books. 2004. ISBN 9781594480751. 
• Draining the Sea. Riverhead Books. 2008. ISBN 9781594489730. 
• The Mirror in the Well. Dalkey Archive Press. 2008. ISBN 9781564785114. http://books.google.com/books?id=hHACRaSclUAC&pg=PP1&dq=Micheline+Aharonian+Marcom&lr=. 

Reviews

Publishers Weekly:

Through [its] vivid imagery, Marcom gives voice to the essence of obsession and sexuality while tracing the deterioration of relationships. [The Mirror in the Well] is a cultural, feminist and human statement, but at its core, it is an unrestrained exploration of the intersection of emotion and physical desires.

San Francisco Chronicle:

Marcom's prose is nothing short of gorgeous.

The New York Times Book Review:

The fierce beauty of her prose both confronts readers with many breathtaking cruelties and carries us past them.

Publishers Weekly:

Her writing is mellifluous, so poetically inflected at times as to lull the reader into a trance.

Kirkus:

Marcom's language is always fervent, whether gorgeous or foul.

References

1. ^ Benson, Heidi. "Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Saudi - Media (3 of 5) Bay Area writers crowd dais / Whiting". The San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?o=2&f=/c/a/2006/10/26/DDGR2LV9SV1.DTL. 
2. ^ http://www.mills.edu/news/2006/newsarticle10262006professors_whiting_prizes.php
3. ^ http://www.mills.edu/news/2005/newsarticle09232005marcom_pen_award.php
4. ^ http://www.lannan.org/lf/bios/detail/micheline-aharonian-marcom/
5. ^ http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/tariq-ali/

External links

• Author's website
• Interview, KCRW
• "Interview with Micheline Aharonian Marcom," Shushan Avagyan, Context N°22, Dalkey Archive Press, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• "(Un)Disciplining Traumatic Memory: Mission Orphanages and the Afterlife of Genocide in Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy," Rebecca Saunders and Shushan Avagyan, Contemporary Women's Writing 2010, Oxford Journals

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Name	Marcom, Micheline Aharonian
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Date of birth	1968
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